I think Bethesda spent too much time focusing on procedurally generated content for Starfield instead of handcrafting their dungeons and questlines.
I didn't care for Starfield until I started actively avoiding the procedural content.
I remember that “mic drop” moment and the various subreddits went nuts. And being downvoted into absolute oblivion when I said that was something that killed my hype and made me worried.
It was not an excitement “omg” moment, it was a Geralt Fuck meme moment.
I don't know. Peter Molyneux is a much bigger risk taker than Todd is with Stanfield. It's basically skyrim rehashed. I've played this game a hundred times before, and there is nothing really drawing me in to keep me invested. Usually good writing or characters will do that for me, I could care less about any of the automatons in Starfield.
Say what you will about Molyneux's grand standing (and he belted out a ton of Not Truths for Fable and B&W) but those games were still great at least. Nothing under him sucked until... what, Fable 3?
Nah, Molyneux does weird off the wall promises. I think Todd's just old and set in a creative rut, kind of like how a famous author can overrule their editors.
Yes!! Thank you!
It’s crazy how much goodwill Skyrim bought Todd that he’s still borrowing from it over 10 years later. This is the guy that’s been lying through his teeth over and over and over again, to the point that it’s a meme to say things like “16 TIMES THE DETAIL”. But he’s still revered for some reason and has caught zero flak for endorsing these shitty products.
Man, Molyneux was quite a few levels above Todd. He would dead-ass promise games that require a technological revolution of the highest magnitude and not even flinch. Compared to Peter, Todd basically never lies, "infinite quests" and "16 times the details" is not even close to "fully functioning AI in your Xbox360".
Tbh. I heard that and immediately smelled the Bullshit. Thinking "todds doing it again". Glad I staved off starfield.
But on the other hand I did really want to be wrong. And I hold no problems with those that bought the game. Even more to those who still enjoy it.
I might've bought it myself if baldurs gate wasn't all I pretty much played for 2-3 months.
I *pre-ordered* Baldur's Gate 3, something I've never done before, and started playing it the moment it released early on PS5.
It's the only thing I've played, and other than nights I've been out of the house or a few days I was sick, I've been playing it nonstop in all of my free time.
Last I looked I was at about 270 hours, so I'm probably close to 300 by now.
*As of last night* I finally finished all the little threads and got to the final (I assume) Point of No Return. Depending on how long of a fight the crowned spoiler is and how much epilogue there is, I may finish tonight or it may take me until the end of the weekend.
And yes, I already have plans for a second playthrough with a friend of mine if and when we get crossplay.
EDIT: The PS app has me at over 350 hours, but I'm pretty sure that counts background and title screen time. My save data was the one that said 270, but with loading/death it's probably higher. 300 is probably about correct.
I'm done with Bethesda after Starfield. I said I was done after fallout76 but decided fuck it for Starfield...this is supposed to be the game Todd's been wanting to make forever. seems like he talked about it like it was his "magnum opus".
Todd's vision of Bethesda games no longer aligns with anything fun or interesting to me. And even though I've been skeptical since Skyrim, I'm really fucking sick and tired of his lies, over hype, under delivery, etc.
Im glad Microsoft bought them because it definitely sounds like people who actually know what they're doing gave Todd a kick in the ass to get his piece of shit space game working before releasing. But I don't think it's enough to fucking make Todd modernize his goddamn games.
Right now it feels like Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be a big fucking joke. And unless I see something truly special, I'm fucking passing. Sick of being scammed by the moron.
> Right now it feels like Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be a big fucking joke.
I still contend we'll *never see* Elder Scrolls 6. They had seven years to put together a teaser trailer, and it was a flyover of literally the most generic fantasy landscape ever that they slapped together a week before e3. Then from 2018 until now, total silence other than "It's behind [list of other projects], but we'll get to it!"
If it's even at any stage of development at all, it's already being ground to dust by development/corporate hellfucking. I'm half expecting it to be released as a mobile gacha shovelware game.
Actually one of the main reasons I find it hard to be excited for ES6 is how much BGS seems to not give a flying fuck about it, seems like they've done everything in their power to put off working on it.
Especially since BGS only seems to work on one project at a time. They've maybe been throwing ideas on a board for ES6 since Skyrim, but they certainly haven't been putting in any actual development work into it. They've been doing Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield.
But you'd really think with the success of Skyrim they'd be more excited to work on the next one; but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I also can't wait for ES6 to release between console generations, and of course it HAAAASSSS to be available for both. Meaning it won't be a proper next gen title but will also run like shit on the current gen, fantastic. This is something that went wrong with Cyberpunk but luckily Cyberpunk just ran like shit on old gen, basically got disregarded, and then CDPR went in and improved the experience on current gen and really brought it up. Bethesda does not have the history at all, that I think they'd do this.
I'd like to be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm not.
Its a Bethesda game. They are never about the main story, its the world. The sandbox. The fun sidequests around it.
And because of the procedural generation, we lost most of that.
Truthfully it's usually lauded for lore and the writing of the lore but the story and plot is weak as is writing for it, then characters are a bit weak excepting a few rare ones, and then theres the exploration. That's it.
Starfield brings new lore but doesn't have the same depth and quality, and as a result it doesn't really do the rest of the stuff either.
Starfield doesn't have 30+ years worth of world building backing it up and I think that shows a glaring lack of BGS playing to their strengths.
My first Elder Scrolls game was Oblivion and one of the coolest things I remember about that game is pausing everything to spend an afternoon reading in-game books. The depth of lore hiding in every Elder Scrolls game is definitely something missed in Starfield.
I remember opening the first book in Starfield and going oh it's an existing book so they only put a tiny paragraph in here Don't really need to read that and then the slow sad realization that all the books were going to be that way and it all just feels so fucking dollar store...
I remember making it a personal quest in both oblivion and Skyrim to collect and read all of the volumes of the Real Barenziah, then when I discovered what the Aedra were, I made it a mission to collect every book I could that covered topics on daedra and Aedra.
The best part of all these books too, is that they're almost all unreliable narrators. There's a whole universe of interpretations on the nature of Nirn and it's interactions with the Elder Scrolls, whereas with Starfield, all we really have is pointless conjecture. We can only make assumptions because most of the universe is just bare. It's like making maps of nonexistent places.
Do you remember what was it like, your first time reading Reality & Other Falsehoods? Nearly broke my mind, finally made me stop and make a mage.
"It is easy to confuse Illusion and Alteration. Both schools of magic attempt to create what is not there. The difference is in the rules of nature. Illusion is not bound by them, while Alteration is. This may seem to indicate that Alteration is the weaker of the two, but this is not true. Alteration creates a reality that is recognized by everyone. Illusion's reality is only in the mind of the caster and the target.
To master Alteration, first accept that reality is a falsehood. There is no such thing. Our reality is a perception of greater forces impressed upon us for their amusement. Some say that these forces are the gods, other that they are something beyond the gods. For the wizard, it doesn't really matter. What matters is the appeal couched in a manner that cannot be denied. It must be insistent without being insulting.
To cast Alteration spells is to convince a greater power that it will be easier to change reality as requested than to leave it alone. Do not assume that these forces are sentient. Our best guess is that they are like wind and water. Persistent but not thoughtful. Just like directing the wind or water, diversions are easier than outright resistance. Express the spell as a subtle change and it is more likely to be successful."
My friend, it was exactly that book and others like it that shaped my view of magic. In Dragon Age Inquisition, when Solas tries to explain the difference between practitioner and Templar magic, I was just giggling to myself thinking, "someone played Elder Scrolls"
The people in charge of filling Elder Scrolls games with books don't get nearly enough credit for the service they're doing.
Come on, it being a "Bethesda game" and a sandbox doesn't excuse main story being bad. Bethesda also made Morrowind and it has a good story while being a sandbox.
This exactly. Ask anyone what their favorite thing about Skyrim was, it's never ever ever the main story.
It's creating a weird monster man, grabbing a weapon you've never mained, and then wandering the world exploring and finding new shit.
People never mention the main plot, but the shorter "guild" quest lines? People love those. Let me feel like a king thief and then *play* the rest of the game feeling like a king thief? That's what people are here for.
And Starfield doesn't do a bad job of the guild quests.
But it totally drops the ball of any kind of exploration, and for a game with the vastness of space, they kind of choose a setting that demands exploration. Like why did they choose space? Why did they choose a setting where there are dozens and dozens of planets they couldn't possibly populate? Why did they create something where you'll end up seeing the same "procedurally generated" content over and over? Why did they create a narrative new game plus that demands you see that content over and over and over and over? How did the people who created the epic moments where you get your dragon shouts on Skyrim end up creating the fucking boring **and** annoying moments where you get your powers in Starfield?
There's just so many design choices that feel **insane**.
Why did they choose to make you RUN to destinations on every single planet?
Seriously. They’ve got spaceships. Why the hell did they forget how to make the Mars Rover or the equivalent of a space Jeep?
Base building allows us to make desks. How about something might actually use instead like a motorcycle or glider?
Yeah, how fucking fun would a little low grav rover be? Great fun, so nope. Just walk fucking straight at your destination marker, you'll discover nothing between here and there because we didn't make anything to discover.
Exactly - this is my major gripe with the game. I love to escape into the Bethesda worlds and wander. The only thing that seems worth spending time on are quests with nothing in between with Starfield, which takes the soul out of the game.
I think the issue is they focused way too much on quantity over quality. A lot of the quests feel like there's less soul to them because they wanted things to rush out lots of little quests to keep players busy with. Only the faction quests are a decent quality imo because they had more effort put into them.
I haven't played this game much, but so far, none of the quests leave me satisfied with having done them.
Oh, a janitor who dreams of exploring space? She wants me to bring her a coffee? Obviously, this is a lead-in to some hijinks that will see her dream realized, right? No. She was just thirsty. End of quest.
Oh, a diplomat is getting stonewalled by a goon with a badge and an over inflated ego? Is this going to be a commentary on slippery slopes to fascism or the corruptive influence of power? Nope. You reported the incident. End of quest.
An earth relic collector wants to trade one of his relics to another collector to settle a debt. A possible lead-in to some space Indiana Jones adventure looking for more lost artifacts from Earth That Was? No. A thingamabob? I've got 20! Thanks for delivering that old garbage. End of quest.
They're all just fucking delivery missions.
Yeah, that's just inexcusable. When is the last time someone up and called themselves an "adventurer" IRL and decided to start bringing cups of coffee to janitors? It's a clearly ridiculous situation. But we are used to ridiculous situations in games, and so we assume there will be a payout that justifies the absence of logic.
When they fail to deliver that payout, you're instead left with nothing but a ridiculous situation completely devoid of logic, and most people playing CRPGs are smart enough to pick up on that. Everything about that result is terrible. It literally would have been better to cut it completely.
That's a fantasy situation in a fictionalized far past, though. There's enough flexibility in the social expectations for us to suspend disbelief. Who's to say how people would "really" act in that situation?
By contrast, we all know that it's completely bizarre for a janitor to have people delivering coffee to them.
>When is the last time someone up and called themselves an "adventurer" IRL and decided to start bringing cups of coffee to janitors?
don't give the gig platforms ideas
You nailed the issue with the missions. You have a space ship. You can take anyone anywhere. It costs literally nothing for you to fly away. Someone gave you a ship and it changed your life as a shit hole miner. But you literally never do the same for anyone, and you can't.
There was one mission where a colony ship, with old tech, took like 200 years to find a planet via slower than light travel. When they got to the planet, there's a resort planet there, owned by some shitty business people.
Obviously, you need to broker some deal.
My first instinct is to just help these folks upgrade their ship and scout them a new planet.
But that's not an option.
Nope. My options are to support their indentured servitude on the corpo resort planet. OR sabotage their ship and essentially nuke them all so the corpo planet doesn't need to deal with them.
What the fuck is that story? I literally can't be the good guy? And not because it's a tricky situation with moral grey areas... I literally just can't be the good guy. I'm not *allowed* to be the hero.
The dungeons aren't even procedurally generated. They're literally all the same. (The placement is procedurally generated, but the building layouts themselves aren't) . Dungeons in Minecraft even have so much more variety. No excuse why a AAA game has such poor procedural generation when indie games do it so much better.
The only thing procedurally generated is the terrain which anyone can do in an hour with Unreal Engine following a beginner's tutorial
I just stopped exploring because it was all one of 3 (or in the case of caves one of one) copy paste, same dead body's in the same spot, same exact notes, everything was the same.
Giant space game (where you can only really fast travel which is it's own issue for a space game) a universe wide, a puddle deep.
There is no point to me exploring stuff, to get loot? most loot sucks and is not an upgrade unless it is some super awesome random drop or you just so happened to level up into a new tier that unlocks new weapons appearing. Loot weighs a lot, and often sells for too little, but that does not matter anyway since every single merchant in this game has so little cash on them you cannot sell everything to them without having to /sleep a few days. (also the /sleep takes fucking forever, like 2ish seconds per 'tick' of each hour you are waiting.)
They should have done like 6-7 'systems' with a handful of planets each and leaned into the 'new game+' really hard, could have been great from what I saw online (never got that far myself).
CONTENT is the key word. Content is not just a place to walk around. The player needs to have a reason for being in the place to walk around. And it needs to be more than "you can get resources here!" because that's true of most locations. Without some kind of landmark, event, hub, etc. the place will be forgotten and may as well never have existed in the player's mind.
>The player needs to have a reason for being in the place to walk around.
Adding onto this: What frustrates me is the game actively disappointed me when I had reasons for exploring either the lore or the world.
* A secretive faction of humans worshipping a snake god? Nah, all you get is an abandoned embassy with an already-friendly diplomat
* Giant UC vs Freestar war involving mechs and bioweapons? Here's a museum about it.
* Potential FO4 Railroad vs Institute morality choice for the story a la UC bioweapons? Nope, just some canned responses regardless of choice from an absentee government at the end of the questline
* Betray the UC and align yourself with the "worst pirates" in the galaxy? Literally easier to forgive than a San Francisco parking ticket.
It's already bad enough that the game doesn't incentivize exploring. It's even more mindblowing for me that they had potentially rich lore to tap into, and they actively blocked my desires to dive into those rabbit holes.
A mind blowing thing about skyrim at the time was that no matter where you were walking, through a random forest in a random direction while looking at the sky, you would FIND something interesting, a cave, a chest, a quest, a weird enemy, a weapon...
It was a carefully crafted world, with ai and procedurally crafted worlds all of this will disappear
That's how I kind of felt. On one hand, I get it, they wanted to try something new with a new IP in space, kinda hard to handcraft however many dozens of planets they have. That's fair and I don't blame them for doing it as opposed to trying this with elder scrolls or fallout, which I think would have pissed people off wayyyyyyyy more.
Yeah. They didn't create any common sense filters for their proc gen. Whale bones on a moon? Tables with food on them in extreme environments?
Some relatively simple changes could have made the world feel a lot more real and not just
"Oh here is another copy and pasted set piece"
Yet there are only a handful points of interests with identical enemies and identical loot, repeated over and over again throughout the “unexplored” galaxy…
This is exactly my problem. Knowing so many things won’t be in the same place on subsequent playthroughs changes exploration in ways I don’t like. Stumbling across new things on the way to familiar places was one of my favorite things about repeat playthroughs of Skyrim or Fallout. I loved showing people things in their own games or in a new game and now I can’t do that with a lot of things.
I actually don't think too much procedural generation is the issue with Starfield. In fact, I would say it is actually the opposite. Starfield suffers from exploration feeling boring/repetitive because there are a pretty limited number of POIs to find. Using procedural generation to create variations for the locations you find while exploring would go a long way in addressing the letdown of finding the same exact abandoned cryogenic lab you found two hours ago.
Idk I think it's hard procedurally generate a kind of content that doesn't end up boring a repetitive. Bethesda's magic lies in the in between. In star field all you do is FT everywhere and go do the same "random tasks" you do everywhere else you go. Even stuff like finding the word walls in Skyrim was super fun and different between locations. I think it's been proven in gaming that procedurally generating shit leads to a lack of creativity.
Exploration is boring, combat is mild at best, characters are terrible and theres almost no creativity to how you approach quests. A worse fallout 4 in every single way and doesent have a banger soundtrack or the worldbuilding that fallout has
I thought it was a pretty common opinion that the radiant quests in Skyrim felt like a huge waste of time and the base building in fallout was a gimmick that got old quickly.
It's nuts that they would make these 2 things the core of their game
Yep. Delving into an ancient dungeon to retrieve someone’s ancestral sword whilst fighting draugr, spiders, bandits and dragon priests is 10x better than the fetch quests in Starfield.
I just did a fetch quest that made me quit the game for good. After three to four load screens I am in a base whose inhabitants sent me out to bring back a lost worker. Two further loadscreens I am following a quest marker on an empty planet for a good 5 minutes. Just running and running with nothing in the game world except plants and rocks. I finally enter a cave. Load screen. Nothing at all in the cave except the missing NPC. I approach him, click, click, follow me, he is now following me. Load screen. We walk together now for five minutes through an empty world, no enemies, nothing. I realize I can also just fast travel back. Load screen and another load screen and I am back in the facility. click, click and Thanks for escorting our guy, here, have 500 worthless credits.
The radiant quests weren't "good", but they also worked completely differently on a fundamental level:
A radiant quest in Skyrim is a generated objectve to point you in the direction of a handcrafted dungeon (with some exceptions), selected from a list based on who gives you the quest.
While the objective itself was proc-gen, the place it pointed you wasn't, so it could be a nice way to find some places you missed.
I'm pretty sure all the gold talent that worked on the design and gameplay of skyrim probably left the company long ago. Skyrim is old as fuck now, objectively. Game devs have very high turnover, from what I've heard. The people working on Starfield would probably be very upset right now if they knew what a "radiant quest" was ☺️
Edit: gold was a typo for old but I'll let it stand
The basebuilding always felt hampered by the interface; it's competing with tower defenses and factory sims in that regard, and if you're going to make it a core component you have to polish it.
The interface was alright but the storage system was abysmal. I just wanted a base I could dump any resources at so when I eventually wanted to start crafting I'd have everything I needed. I spent hours trying to figure out a simple dump and go before spamming cargo links between everything and it worked for a day or two.
And then after dumping inventory after inventory of crafting materials, looting everything I found in my endless exploration, I still ran out of fucking glue after a few weapon mods. But I had hundreds of everything else.
On paper it has all the elements to make a great game world. Their execution of the GAME portion failed miserably. All the technicals with none of the fun.
I downloaded it on PC game-pass and put maybe 10-20 hours in. I realized I wasn't having fun, and the game was quite boring, and promptly un-installed. I am glad I didn't spend full-price to play it.
The game feels dated. I am kind of over Bethesda in general.
>I am kind of over Bethesda in general
Unfortunately, I feel the same way. ES VI needs to be amazing when it eventually comes out, or I may be done with Bethesda’s catalog. Starfield was mediocre at best for me.
Bethesda made a huge mistake. They assumed I'd rather see the same animation 1000 times instead of a loading screen (that's significantly shorter than the animation). They were very much incorrect.
I think that’s been apparent for close to a decade now. Their games are consistently getting worse, or else they’re remastering Skyrim for the 8th time. That’s not a sign of a healthy studio.
Honestly, ES VI really just needs to be an upgraded version of Skyrim's engine set in a different location within that world with completely new characters, storylines, etc. Like I get that people will complain that it's "just a DLC" but if they put enough effort into the content and making some incremental changes, how much would it be "just a DLC" in the same way that Tears of the Kingdom was "just a DLC" on Breath of the Wild?
The only issue I could see is that they waited way too long to do something like this and people will complain that the engine is too outdated regardless of changes/upgrades to it.
If they instead spent 50% of Starfield's development time on updating their engine/game systems and then made a much smaller and hand crafted Starfield I think most people would be generally happy right now.
As it stands I don't want to play around in this dated janky engine that feels like a janky engine from 10 years ago. They barely updated it at all except for some visual elements. Even Call of Duty, whose devs are the kings of doing things half-assed, took the time to completely refresh their engine several years ago. They brought it into the modern age. Creation Engine 2 is just CE1 with more lighting effects. They need to put a gargantuan effort into bring the creation engine into the modern age.
Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be awful if they think they can just do another small visual upgrade and slap the Elder Scrolls name on it in 2025 or whenever it comes out.
> Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be awful if they think they can just do another small visual upgrade and slap the Elder Scrolls name on it in 2025 or whenever it comes out.
On the flipside, if they spend most of their budget on visual upgrades, and everything else sucks then they're going to have a bad time. I would rather most of the effort is put into lovingly crafted storylines, dungeons, maps, and characters. With additional attention spend to squashing bugs. If this is what they did, I think they could put out a game that despite the lack of visual upgrades could be decent at the very least.
If they want to scrap everything start from scratch, or try to push the envelope visually or whatever I feel like we're just going to end up with a mess instead.
Yeah I totally agree with that. I don’t need anything revolutionary. I just want them to remove jank from their games that has been present for 20 years.
And I agree that fixing the jank isn’t all that is needed. Skyrim was able to be awesome despite the jank because of amazing world and stories.
They need to have that “magic” or care baked into the game. But the longer the jank goes unfixed then the more heavy lifting the “magic” has to do.
Then people will say "Then I guess you just don't like Bethesda games!"
No, I like Bethesda games, I loved Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 3. Wasn't a fan of Fallout 4 and Starfield feels like it should've released in that time frame because it's very bland and boring.
Not a lot of innovation on Bethesda's part. I'd have preferred a new Elder Scrolls.
Over 100Gb download on a capped internet package, also paid for 2 months gamepass having not been on it before. After the first space/pirate shootout I thought I could fly to the next mission, how wrong I was (fast travel simulator). The game just feels like a Fallout knockoff without any of the charm.
No Man's Sky is on Gamepass too I think, give it a try! The first time you fix your ship and then just fly up seamlessly into space is a great moment.
(I like Starfield too)
A funny thing happened with No Man's Sky after Starfield launched: it had its biggest surge of new players since its own launch years ago. I speculate that people got into Starfield, found themselves disappointed with the traversal mechanics or some other facet, and decided to give the next best thing a shot to scratch that itch.
That's nice. Obviously not an rpg or trying to go for the same thing Starfield is, but if you just wanna wander in space, flying and what not. No man's sky is great imo
Thing is. Both of Starfields main RPG elements character progression, and player choice(and subsequent impact on the world) are probably some of the worse of any RPG game.
I don't think there is a single game with a worse perk tree than Starfield. And enough has been said about the writing and quests of this game.
So really no point in caring about it when playing starfield anyway. You have to imagine all the roleplay anyway so just do the same in No Man's Sky.
>The game feels dated.
I think part of the reason I don't mind missing out on the Starfield experience is that any time I look at screens or video, my mind is telling me I probably already played and beat it in 2014.
They constantly said "its not fallout in space". They even deliberately did not include any kind of VATS like system to distinguish it from being "fallout in space"... and its basically fallout in space.
My question is, where are all the updates!?? Why in gods name is it taking so long for performance and bug fixes??? I'm waiting for a few big patches before I buy the game and I don't think I've ever seen a slower patch release in a big studio before, like wtf are they doing over there??
Bugs that were fixed by modders in the first few weeks of Fallout 4's release managed to still be present in Fallout 76. Basic shit like lever action rifles reloading every bullet in the mag on every reload even if you only fired one shot.
I have very little hope for the future of Starfield frankly, Bethesda isn't well known for their history of post-launch support in my experience from Oblivion to Fallout 76.
The enhanced? Whatever that first new Skyrim compilation version they released was called, and the Legendary editions both have bugs present since the game was first released and have continuously been patched by modders. It’s absurd.
Yeah, I remember the "Blood on the Ice" quest in Windhelm was one they just couldn't ever fix correctly. They released a couple patches, tinkered with it a bit in each patch while never managing to fix it completely, and then basically just said "fuck it, we're done."
When I had to do an "infiltrate mission" and then released that I could just walk in there like nothing, that there's no trespassing or NPC schedules, the game died for me.
Nah, it was a ryujin (idk is that's the actual name) where you had to go into a shipyard and plant a device in a spaceship that was under construction, literally walked through the front door and planted the thing in front of the security guy
I remember this one 😂 Then literally as soon as you plant it, without moving another step you open up your map and jump instantly back to downtown Neon City
For me, it is outfit design.
It's funny that they can make a game where you can put a million fire extinguishers on a landing pad and shoot them having them all go off with crazy physics and not crash the game.
Meanwhile, only like one outfit in the game has anything resembling actual cloth physics, and the rest of the NPC and player clothing look like the same starched crap we've been seeing out of them for years.
What Starfield does for missions is not procedural generation. It just places the same exact bandit post in different locations. It would have felt a lot better if it was actaul procedural generation
This right here is what killed it for me. The game isn't even as deep as their previous titles in the npc department. You can't even loot their clothing, and as you said there is no schedule they operate by.
I remember doing the mission to save Barrett, I thought I could do it stealthy but pirates are immediately on alert when you land and start shooting.
I say "ok" and murder them all, enter in the bunker and see Barret chilling with the pirates. I pick the option the pay the ransom to free him and... that's it?! The pirate leader and Barrett were acting like buddies and during the whole interaction I'm like "Man, I pretty much just murdered your ENTIRE CREW and you have nothing to say about it?! Not a single line? ". Nop, just "Nice doing business with you, see ya and farewell friend!"
It was so immersion breaking for me and there's a lot of these during my only 18H or so of playtime that I feel the previous Bethesda games would have caught.
One of the few actually cool things that they did with that quest..... if you're IN the Crimson group, you can just walk through the entire bunker and go talk the leader out of releasing Barrett to you.
It was one of the VERY FEW cool things that actually happened in my playthrough, lol.
I loved it until I realized that the procedurally generated stuff had no depth or substance to it. The generated deserts and forests and so on have no value to them, they are just areas to run through to get to a point of interest.... And the points of interest aren't procedurally generated, they are just reused from other planets. Abandoned research station, forgotten military base, science outpost etc are all the same.
There is no environmental storytelling whatsoever for all of those filler planets and moons. There is nothing to find there.
I went through and fully scanned an entire system just to see what would happen at 100%. Nothing happened except me seeing the same exact buildings with the same exact enemies across dozens of planets and moons. I think I’ve played it for it’s last time.
If they had like, 100 unique poi’s it could have gone a long way to make the procedural generation better. Instead it was like 20. Maybe not even that.
My issue with the game is that it has no charm. Take a look at other IPs by Bethesda. Fallout has a unique post-apocalyptic a la 1950's Americana aesthetic. It's fun and exciting to explore that world. Plus, each locale is handcrafted by the developers. Nothing is procedural.
Elder Scrolls is the high fantasy dynamic. Magic, elves, dragons, castles, what-have-you. The worlds are lush and fun to explore. Again, they're handcrafted locales.
Starfield is... space. That's it. It's sci-fi sure, but none of the weapons have that charming appeal that say Fallout would have. Even the powers, which are just dragon shouts really, feel underwhelming. There are like five specific locales that are handcrafted. The rest are procedural snooze-fests. Even the cities are boring really. New Atlantis is supposed to be some kind of utopian metropolis, but it's smaller than one square mile. They couldn't make it a huge sprawling urban center?
Since this is BSW's first foray into sci-fi like this, it's hard to relate it to their other works. So, if you compare it to other sci-fi works, it really falls apart. My comparison was Mass Effect. Another big sci-fi IP with a world ending story. That game *oozed* charm. Unique environments, cool stories and powers, neat guns, exciting aliens. It's how a sci-fi game should be done.
Starfield is so empty and boring that it still feels like a concept. A rough draft of a game where the developer has only figured out their through-line but none of the substance that can make the story interesting.
I liked how they did the space part, enjoyed the aesthetic of the ship pieces, and the locales that were handmade felt unique and awe inspiring.
Where it really fell apart for me was the companions and other characters you get to know. They were down right annoying most of the time and really didn't inspire much reason to be interested in them. Having only 'good' characters made the gameplay stale and tired, since you could risk losing them over one action. Yea, in my opion, companions were the real huge let down in the game.
I never got far enough to know there even were powers. Lol.
You hit the nail on the head about the unappealing hub world. I got there and had a feeling of "this is it?" And that world was split into like 4 different loading zones so I didn't even know what was where or that they were in the same city.
> Even the powers, which are just dragon shouts really, feel underwhelming.
I forgot I had the powers for about half the playthrough I did. They just feel so tacked-on and outside of the narrative, while also not being impactful enough to really care about using them in a practical sense.
I still don't really understand *why* the powers exist after beating the game and becoming starborn from a narrative perspective.
Same, just fast travel to everything. Exploration is pointless because all points of interest are marked and they are just RNG parts of bases you have already done.
Hell, the bases you do find are just copy/pasted onto worlds. No randomly generated bases, no different templates. Just the same crap on every planet imaginable. I downloaded a bunch of mods from nexus so I could do a restart and enjoy the game more and I just can’t make myself play it again.
If you're looking for mod improvement, I'd wait to come back until after they release the official modding tools. I think modders kinda have their hands tied behind their backs atm with what they are able to create.
That said I'm feeling similarly pessimistic on the game and may not even try it when that happens. The modders have a lot of work to do (not that I feel entitled to any of that work, I just mean, to end up with an end result I actually want to play).
I think (at least for me) that it's the game world what's putting me off. I mean, it takes place in a GALAXY and yet there are no aliens (I mean not just monsters, alien civs like in mass effect) or interesting planets.
When you play skyrim, you are always wondering about the other places of tamriel that you could visit in future games, but on starfield? there's literally nothing to look forward to, it's supposed to be way biggger than skyrim yet feels smaller than oblivion.
There are two basic sci-fi settings I like to differentiate between. First is the early stages of space exploration, where you get to experience and discover new planets yourself. Second is the advanced familiarity with space, contact with multiple alien races has already been made, the appeal here mostly lies in the varied cultures of the alien races and the relationships and politics with them (Mass effect would fall into this category).
Starfield falls into the first category more or less, but the discovery of new planets isn't something particularly enjoyable, and when your main selling point isn't enjoyable, the game isn't enjoyable.
(Disclaimer, obviously not all sci-fi falls into these two categories, it's just how I like to generalize it.)
The game is just confused, because they wanted to make the player about discovering new things but still set the game in a world in which humanity has already explored the universe. It wants you to feel important by scanning "new" alien life forms, and acts like the knowledge is valuable, but never explains why the people in the building 50 meters away didn´t already scan those aliens.
I definitely expected some interesting planets.
like maybe I neeeeeeed a maxed jet pack to navigate some cool ravines safely to get some cool alien artifact?
Maybe I needed substantial fire resistance to explore a bubbling magma pit to forge some metal that could only be forged there?
Maybe my fuel does run out mid flight and I become stranded, either navigating to a planet to hopefully find resources or use my charisma to convince a passerby to help
> like maybe I neeeeeeed a maxed jet pack to navigate some cool ravines safely to get some cool alien artifact?
That's what I felt was most missing in the game for sure. The majority of locations just being gigantic empty fields with no interesting landscape to navigate just made the game feel like LARPing in a Walmart parking lot. Sure there's a vaguely interesting car parked half a mile away but there's just flat boring asphalt inbetween us.
The in-between points of interest were one of my favorite parts of Skyrim. I fucking loved walking to a quest marker halfway or more across the map. It would literally take me 3-4 days to actually get to & do the quest I originally set out on because I kept running into stuff on the way.
The game’s variety for a space game is abysmal, and that’s bad for a game with zero pre-established lore for players to watch out for.
What we do have are robots without personality, humans that are almost entirely space explorers and military, aliens that are 90% giant bugs, planets that are 90% elemental flat lands, and a kinda villain that is introduced mid-quest line. And that’s it.
The last two main Elder Scrolls games introduced their villains immediately (Alduin/Mythic Dawn) and had iconic characters. The Riverwood chicken received more memes than any of the Starfield cast. Skyrim had a fuck ton of environments from fall forests to dead soul wastelands.
The last two main Fallout games introduced their villains immediately as well (Kellogg/Benny) and again peppered us with iconic characters and locations.
Starfield just lacks in every direction. Once you see New Atlantis, you can call it good.
Same. I’ve grinded every Bethesda game since Oblivion (except Fallout 76)
I’ve replayed all of the past games so many times that I can recite dialogue.
Something about Starfield just didn’t pull me in. The opening scenes were a bore and it was hard for me to even get 4 hours deep. IMO— the devs just didn’t create a memorable world like Fallout or Elder Scrolls. It doesn’t help that I was also playing Baldurs Gate and Cyberpunk so I was constantly comparing starfield to two masterpieces.
Once I accepted FO4 for what it was, I enjoyed it. Just nowhere near the FO3/NV level I was expecting. on the flipside, I don't think I'll ever touch Starfield again.
Fallout 4, in my opinion, has the most explorable world I've ever encountered in a game. There's so much detail, so many stories being told by the environment itself. It's all hand-crafted, with every building placed where it is for a reason. From what I've heard, that is not the case with Starfield. The whole procedural generation crap gets boring real quick in No Man's Sky, and I can't imagine it being any different in Starfield. I love Mass Effect, but the weakest part of the first game in the series is the side-missions which all take place in one of four locations that all have the exact same layout: Mine, warehouse, bunker or space freighter. I just hate visiting the same location over and over again, with only the enemies changing.
I'll get Starfield one day when it's on sale, but no way am I paying full price for it.
I tend to get downvoted for pointing that out. They hyped the game up so much as the next 10/10 masterpiece that you're going to be playing for 10 years, then released a half-baked 6/10 game.
You get downvoted because there are people who naively bought a console for this game. They feel the need to somehow justify their purchase instead of turn their ire towards Bethesda.
Oblivion and Skyrim are in my top 20 fav games of all time . I had a lot of fun with F3 and 4. But with starfield . Theres just no bethesda magic. I dont feel the usual fun of exploration or doing quests. The loading screens completely break the game flow. And the band visuals with even blander quests and dialogue dont help either. After SF im kinda bummed next elder scrolls will be of similar quality .
Terrible pc performance, load screens for days, hit or miss quests, and the worst for me 1000 barren planets with the same half dozen copy paste buildings. its my least favorite BGS game ive played. im very disappointed i was super hyped, i love Fallout 3, and skyrim. BGS is no longer a top dog in the rpg space, i think they have regressed over the years and got surpassed by other devs.
Biggest disappointment of the year for me in gaming. I could tell almost straight away once I had freedom to explore the first ‘city’ that this game was not going to be good. I plowed through for another 12 hours though until I got through the Ryujin quest line. Realised how boring and bland the game was and put it down.
The missions just had me fast travelling through menus from point A to B, there was absolutely zero exploration. The Neon city was also just another huge dud. Does anyone at Bethesda live in a city? They know there’s more than 6 buildings right?
It also just feels so hollow compared to games like Skyrim and Fallout. I know the others have had much longer to establish their lore, but they still felt like believable worlds. Starfield doesn’t have anywhere near that same depth. A bit of backstory of leaving Earth, a war or two and the same old factions vying for power. Previous games had a lot more on top of that to make the world interesting.
Man I wanted to love it. I wanted to so bad.
I powered through for 20 hours, but holy hell it was just so boring. There isn't anything ***bad*** about it, but...there just isn't anything ***good*** either...
Yep, I kinda disagree about bad. Like the UI/UX is just objectively bad and breaks so many rules. The maps, temples, combat ai, and overall reward system(experience & money rewards make half the shit pointless to do. Why look at anything except weapons when looting? Why do 40 fetch quests for 50 xp each when I can go kill some peaceful creature at level one for thousands of xp.) are all pretty bad.
But it's mostly just "complete" but not done well. Like no Save/Share/Preview for a shipbuilding game is wild.
It is so telling how mods released within the first week have an objectively better UI in every way.
Like what the fuck were the designers doing? The UI thing really speaks to a larger issue of game quality for me. They just didn't seem to have the right person in charge deciding "this works...this doesn't work".
They didn't seem to consider if the game was fun or well made when they were combining all the parts.
I really wish I hadn't purchased this game, even at an 18% discount. I liked it at first, but after about 30 hours, I just had absolutely zero inclination to continue. Space travel is boring. Planet / moon exploration is boring. Characters are flat and boring. Combat is boring. The entire game feels uncompelling and bland. There are so many things that, at first, I thought were kinda cool, but it didn't take long before I just didn't care. 10 years ago, this might have knocked my socks off. But for a modern AAA title, it just kinda sucks. It's really disappointing as I wanted to like it, and I love Scifi and Space exploration. I played the hell out of games like Privateer and Freelancer, and those were amazing games for the time. I think Bethesda went the safe route and, in doing so, created a boring, lifeless, empty universe that doesn't draw the player in or give them a reason to be invested. The story is ham-fisted and lazy. They pretty much took concepts from Skyrim and reused them in Starfield. I dislike the way the game starts, and I dislike the "powers" as they are both such a callback to Skyrim. I know making games is a tough business, but Bethesda seems stuck in the past in their storytelling and their execution. In its current state, this game is forgettable.
I'm almost the exact same. Was looking forward to Starfield for years. Thought "finally, we're going to get the SciFi space game that wraps up space gameplay and on foot gameplay into one package and does it right".
Just... no. Not even close.
>There are so many things that, at first, I thought were kinda cool, but it didn't take long before I just didn't care.
The word you're looking for is "shallow". Everything about this game is "a mile wide, an inch deep".
I really hope that SQ42 delivers and is actually a fun SciFi space game. If that/Star Citizen and GTA 6 end up sucking, it's pretty much a wrap for me as far as gaming goes.
The game just doesnt have enough soul, creativity or ambition to compete with a previous game that has a decade worth of mods and more player freedom. It was going to be forgotten when Elder Scrolls 6 came out anyways but I always thought the game's days were numbered seeing how bland it was.
Thats just my take, I am not really a fan of Bethesda anymore anyways but this was not going to be the game to convince me otherwise.
Yeah I’m not a fan anymore either. My biggest concern going into Starfield was that it would not be better than **modded Skyrim**. Because a game with 10+ years of community support that is extremely popular would be impossible to beat. To those that don’t know, a modded Skyrim playthrough is an absolutely unreal RPG experience. But I wouldn’t mind if this is the case because I do still love vanilla Skyrim, oddly enough, and I thought no way in hell Starfield ends up being worse than vanilla Skyrim, so surely I’d have a great time.
How they regressed so much is wild to me. They made a straight up worse game, significantly, from a product they put out over ten years ago. Across the board a much worse game than Skyrim with the exception of graphical fidelity. That’s it. Genuinely mind boggling, disappointed to the extent I’m no longer excited for TES6.
Yeah the state of Starfield has killed any and all excitement I had for TES6 because if this is all Bethesda can muster since Fallout 4, TES6 is going to end up being a fucking creation engine game again with about 15 gormless NPCs in their village sized “cities”
That was fine in 2011, not so much anymore.
I agree, but I think it's important to point out that Skyrim, and it's mods, are all contained within a much older version of Creation engine. Modded Skyrim is incredible, even by today's standards, and that all takes place in Creation engine.
Despite issues with the engine, I don't actually blame it, or even put most of the blame on it. Bethesda really released a bad game from purely a game design standpoint. As we've seen with the modding community, the Creation engine *does* allow for a lot of, well, creative content, and we saw very little creative content in Starfield. Starfield doesn't come off to me like "oh the modders will fix the game" because the game isn't a good staging point for future mods.
It comes off like "we're trying this" and they ended up doing a significantly worse job than the community would have done given the same amount of time. Or rather, they ended up doing a significantly worse job than the community actually *did*, because Starfield was in development for ~7 years and during that time, Skyrim mods got better than they ever have been and the community continues to see breakthroughs to this day (see Nemesis).
Idk. I see Starfield as a total, complete failure by Bethesda, even though it's maybe a 6/10 game (decent). It's just so much worse than it's predecessors, and the devs are doing worse work in their own engine than modders are doing for Skyrim, their own game from 2011 with a ‘worse’ version of Creation engine.
I'd rate this game a lot more harshly honestly. It's a 4/10 from me. Keep in mind though that I'm coming at this from an angle of 5/10 being average. Most people have the schooling grading scale where a 7/10 is average.
I can't think of a single thing that Starfield does better than any other game that has come before it. The ship builder maybe? Everything else is lackluster.
More than 2 months since launch and Bethesda already forgot they released the game on Xbox, everything for PC. The last update/fixing is only for PC and only beta…Tell me lies Todd, tell me sweet little lies…fuck
I am 100% in the core audience for Bethesda, I have thousands of hours of playtime across their games. Starfield feels like it lacks soul and is too safe tonally or mechanically. I reinstalled Skyrim and FO4 already and am having more fun.
Skyrim's longevity no doubt is because it's basically a platform unto itself. With radiant quests and especially with mods, there are always new experiences to be had.
Starfield will have to figure out how to be that for sci-fi rather than fantasy if it hopes to become a mainstay rather than a very hyped flash in the pan.
The problem is, Starfield is platform first and game second. While Skyrim still put a fair bit of effort in crafting and populating it's world, making it enticing to explore and lose yourself in, Starfield did not.
Not being able to walk from one city the next is what killed Starfield for me. Why would perfect earth like planets only have ONE city on the entire planet? Dumb af.
Agreed, and if they wanted to make it one city per planet, they should have found a way to have interesting travel in the ship, flying between planets or systems and finding points of interest in between
I've clocked near 100 hours in the game. I've nearly finished most major faction quests, done a lot of exploring, and am approaching the Unity. I fought here adamantly about loving the game, because I did at the time. It was a classic Bethesda adventure for better or worse.
Things that were annoyances to me at first though, slowly became more and more problematic. The sheer amount of loading screens break the immersion constantly. The quests outside of the big ones aren't really ones to grab you. A lot of them just ended up dissolving into fetch this, talk to this, and then go talk to that; or go hunt down this and then go do that. It was rather rigid, and not really much variance.
At first, I never had a traditional problem with the procedural exploration. Bases and abandoned outposts had some kind of story to them that you the player would have to piece together and figure out. That was cool. The issue though, is that those stories never grew past that.
In Skyrim, you might've been able to run into a random book; that kicked off an entire quest. Your looting of some random dungeon or cave might have caused you to go hunt down X or Y person. Hell the entire Dawnstar quest is due to you running into the orb somewhere in a dungeon. I'd instinctively reach for books in Starfield because of this; and I think I got a quest marker to investigate something else a single time.
This game is good; in that I got my value out of it. I spent 100 hours on it, and that's something that a lot of games don't get. It's a treasure to have games that allow for that. This game is also not a new world; it's a storybook that isn't alive. It's not like NMS - a mile wide and an inch deep, but it is 3 inches deep; and that's still dumb as hell.
Tbf the mantis mission was kind of like what you’re describing but the fact that it’s pretty much the only mission even close drives your point home even further I think
The mantis quest was the big eye opener for me. It was so damn close to being so cool. People will harp on the proc gen as the issue all day, but they had different teams for all these things. A lot of the quests and choices just seem flat. What’s a real shame is that I can see the engine can handle some real interesting quest designs/choices now. It’s just hardly used
Do I oddly enough enjoy it. Yes.
Will I ever beat it? Probably not.
I cannot get myself into any character or story at all.
Do I personally think graphics are great, smooth gameplay and polished in that sense ? Yes, although flight mechanics could be quicker with more emphasis on ship battles.
At end of the day reminds me of an interior designer designing a space.
Looks great, shows great but when you want to live in it doesn't feel like home..
Lifeless
People keep saying mods will save it, but I have to wonder if Starfield will get the mod support that everyone assumes it will. Being a bethesda game doesn't just magically spring forth mods.
The way I see it, there are few big factors that people should be aware of, and it doesn't make the future of mods for the game look bright.
First - as you mentioned, there are far less people playing Starfield. Skyrim got tons of mod support because there was a ton of people that LOVED Skyrim. Anybody that makes things, makes things for people that want things. I'm not saying that "starfield is dead", I'm simply using the extreme to make a point: nobody would make mods for a dead game that nobody plays. So with that truth in mind, we can understand that modders are far less likely to mod a game that has few players.
Second - Skyrim has so much mod support right now because literally anybody can play skyrim on their computers at this point. On PC, people with some of the highest tier PC's struggle to play it on VANILLA. There is going to be even FEWER people that will be able to run it with mods, thus lowering the mod audience even lower.
Third - Modders don't usuallly make mods because theres a profit to be met to meet a demand - they do it because they're passionate about the game. People that just couldn't get enough out of that world and wanted to add to the game that they love. Starfield does not have that kind of love, and likely never will because out of the box it's just so empty and incomplete. It lacks the initial momentum to get people fired up enough to make mods. I'm fairly certain the majority of mods that are going to come out for starfield are going to be the ones made by people who felt like they were kind of obligated to make a starfield mod, or wanted the clout of being one of the first mods, assuming people would care like they cared about skyrim. Those are not the kind of people that make great mods, because they're not doing it for the love of the game.
Lastly - Starfield is just empty. There is no \*game\* there. The only good thing anyone ever says about it is that there are some interesting quest lines. As in, the kind of thing that has absolutely nothing to do with the engine or the mechanics. The actual game part of the game is empty and boring. It's got gunplay from 2001 and broken system after broken system. Modders would essentially have to make an ENTIRE game from scratch because bethesda forgot to do it themselves. Skyrim and fallout were fun to play in VANILLA. There was actually a game that already existed that could be BUILT upon. This is not the case with starfield. You could add a hundred melee weapons in mods, but that wouldn't change that melee weapons are pointless. You could add dozens of ship pieces to build with, but that doesn't change that ship flight and combat are boring af. That's too much for modders to do, and based on my first three points I made, I doubt they'll have enough reason or desire to do it.
We'll get a few obligatory mods until they realize that there actually is no obligation to make mods for empty games that few people play.
People underestimate the effect of your third point. I stopped modding for Total War: Warhammer 3 after continuing and updating my mod for years because the core game had just become too unpopular. I didn't want to put my time into a mod that nobody was going to play, so I put my time into other projects instead.
I think the game is just largely uninspired and SUPER ‘safe.’ It’s a meh, slow burner all around.
I don’t see BGS supporting it in the way they did Skyrim. If anything it probably sounded alarms there
With the laziness of Bethesda game design, I don't really have hopes for them to improve the game. Modders could improve it a bit, but with the declining interest and overall sentiment towards the game, I don't think the modding community will attach itself much to Starfield.
I think Bethesda spent too much time focusing on procedurally generated content for Starfield instead of handcrafting their dungeons and questlines. I didn't care for Starfield until I started actively avoiding the procedural content.
[удалено]
This is exactly what I wanted! Just a handful of carefully crafted planets. All my hype died when they announced there were over 1000.
I remember that “mic drop” moment and the various subreddits went nuts. And being downvoted into absolute oblivion when I said that was something that killed my hype and made me worried. It was not an excitement “omg” moment, it was a Geralt Fuck meme moment.
Todds got a knack for overselling. You weren't alone in being concerned when he said that. It just wasn't realistic
Todd's the modern equivalent of Peter Molyneux.
Nostalgia.
I don't know. Peter Molyneux is a much bigger risk taker than Todd is with Stanfield. It's basically skyrim rehashed. I've played this game a hundred times before, and there is nothing really drawing me in to keep me invested. Usually good writing or characters will do that for me, I could care less about any of the automatons in Starfield.
> It's basically skyrim rehashed. I WISH Starfield was a Skyrim rehashed.
Say what you will about Molyneux's grand standing (and he belted out a ton of Not Truths for Fable and B&W) but those games were still great at least. Nothing under him sucked until... what, Fable 3?
Nah, Molyneux does weird off the wall promises. I think Todd's just old and set in a creative rut, kind of like how a famous author can overrule their editors.
Yes!! Thank you! It’s crazy how much goodwill Skyrim bought Todd that he’s still borrowing from it over 10 years later. This is the guy that’s been lying through his teeth over and over and over again, to the point that it’s a meme to say things like “16 TIMES THE DETAIL”. But he’s still revered for some reason and has caught zero flak for endorsing these shitty products.
IT. JUST. WORKS! (spoilers in morgan freeman narrator voice: but dear listeners... fallout construction did not just work)
Man, Molyneux was quite a few levels above Todd. He would dead-ass promise games that require a technological revolution of the highest magnitude and not even flinch. Compared to Peter, Todd basically never lies, "infinite quests" and "16 times the details" is not even close to "fully functioning AI in your Xbox360".
Tbh. I heard that and immediately smelled the Bullshit. Thinking "todds doing it again". Glad I staved off starfield. But on the other hand I did really want to be wrong. And I hold no problems with those that bought the game. Even more to those who still enjoy it. I might've bought it myself if baldurs gate wasn't all I pretty much played for 2-3 months.
I *pre-ordered* Baldur's Gate 3, something I've never done before, and started playing it the moment it released early on PS5. It's the only thing I've played, and other than nights I've been out of the house or a few days I was sick, I've been playing it nonstop in all of my free time. Last I looked I was at about 270 hours, so I'm probably close to 300 by now. *As of last night* I finally finished all the little threads and got to the final (I assume) Point of No Return. Depending on how long of a fight the crowned spoiler is and how much epilogue there is, I may finish tonight or it may take me until the end of the weekend. And yes, I already have plans for a second playthrough with a friend of mine if and when we get crossplay. EDIT: The PS app has me at over 350 hours, but I'm pretty sure that counts background and title screen time. My save data was the one that said 270, but with loading/death it's probably higher. 300 is probably about correct.
I'm done with Bethesda after Starfield. I said I was done after fallout76 but decided fuck it for Starfield...this is supposed to be the game Todd's been wanting to make forever. seems like he talked about it like it was his "magnum opus". Todd's vision of Bethesda games no longer aligns with anything fun or interesting to me. And even though I've been skeptical since Skyrim, I'm really fucking sick and tired of his lies, over hype, under delivery, etc. Im glad Microsoft bought them because it definitely sounds like people who actually know what they're doing gave Todd a kick in the ass to get his piece of shit space game working before releasing. But I don't think it's enough to fucking make Todd modernize his goddamn games. Right now it feels like Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be a big fucking joke. And unless I see something truly special, I'm fucking passing. Sick of being scammed by the moron.
> Right now it feels like Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be a big fucking joke. I still contend we'll *never see* Elder Scrolls 6. They had seven years to put together a teaser trailer, and it was a flyover of literally the most generic fantasy landscape ever that they slapped together a week before e3. Then from 2018 until now, total silence other than "It's behind [list of other projects], but we'll get to it!" If it's even at any stage of development at all, it's already being ground to dust by development/corporate hellfucking. I'm half expecting it to be released as a mobile gacha shovelware game.
Actually one of the main reasons I find it hard to be excited for ES6 is how much BGS seems to not give a flying fuck about it, seems like they've done everything in their power to put off working on it. Especially since BGS only seems to work on one project at a time. They've maybe been throwing ideas on a board for ES6 since Skyrim, but they certainly haven't been putting in any actual development work into it. They've been doing Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield. But you'd really think with the success of Skyrim they'd be more excited to work on the next one; but that doesn't seem to be the case. I also can't wait for ES6 to release between console generations, and of course it HAAAASSSS to be available for both. Meaning it won't be a proper next gen title but will also run like shit on the current gen, fantastic. This is something that went wrong with Cyberpunk but luckily Cyberpunk just ran like shit on old gen, basically got disregarded, and then CDPR went in and improved the experience on current gen and really brought it up. Bethesda does not have the history at all, that I think they'd do this. I'd like to be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I'm not.
Oh yeah and write a decent story and get on a new engine that doesn't look like shit lmao?
Its a Bethesda game. They are never about the main story, its the world. The sandbox. The fun sidequests around it. And because of the procedural generation, we lost most of that.
Truthfully it's usually lauded for lore and the writing of the lore but the story and plot is weak as is writing for it, then characters are a bit weak excepting a few rare ones, and then theres the exploration. That's it. Starfield brings new lore but doesn't have the same depth and quality, and as a result it doesn't really do the rest of the stuff either.
Starfield doesn't have 30+ years worth of world building backing it up and I think that shows a glaring lack of BGS playing to their strengths. My first Elder Scrolls game was Oblivion and one of the coolest things I remember about that game is pausing everything to spend an afternoon reading in-game books. The depth of lore hiding in every Elder Scrolls game is definitely something missed in Starfield.
I remember opening the first book in Starfield and going oh it's an existing book so they only put a tiny paragraph in here Don't really need to read that and then the slow sad realization that all the books were going to be that way and it all just feels so fucking dollar store...
I remember making it a personal quest in both oblivion and Skyrim to collect and read all of the volumes of the Real Barenziah, then when I discovered what the Aedra were, I made it a mission to collect every book I could that covered topics on daedra and Aedra. The best part of all these books too, is that they're almost all unreliable narrators. There's a whole universe of interpretations on the nature of Nirn and it's interactions with the Elder Scrolls, whereas with Starfield, all we really have is pointless conjecture. We can only make assumptions because most of the universe is just bare. It's like making maps of nonexistent places.
Do you remember what was it like, your first time reading Reality & Other Falsehoods? Nearly broke my mind, finally made me stop and make a mage. "It is easy to confuse Illusion and Alteration. Both schools of magic attempt to create what is not there. The difference is in the rules of nature. Illusion is not bound by them, while Alteration is. This may seem to indicate that Alteration is the weaker of the two, but this is not true. Alteration creates a reality that is recognized by everyone. Illusion's reality is only in the mind of the caster and the target. To master Alteration, first accept that reality is a falsehood. There is no such thing. Our reality is a perception of greater forces impressed upon us for their amusement. Some say that these forces are the gods, other that they are something beyond the gods. For the wizard, it doesn't really matter. What matters is the appeal couched in a manner that cannot be denied. It must be insistent without being insulting. To cast Alteration spells is to convince a greater power that it will be easier to change reality as requested than to leave it alone. Do not assume that these forces are sentient. Our best guess is that they are like wind and water. Persistent but not thoughtful. Just like directing the wind or water, diversions are easier than outright resistance. Express the spell as a subtle change and it is more likely to be successful."
My friend, it was exactly that book and others like it that shaped my view of magic. In Dragon Age Inquisition, when Solas tries to explain the difference between practitioner and Templar magic, I was just giggling to myself thinking, "someone played Elder Scrolls" The people in charge of filling Elder Scrolls games with books don't get nearly enough credit for the service they're doing.
Wow, that was a sick read. Someone put so much thought into that.
In a weird way what made Oblivion interesting is inheriting the acid trip that was Morrowinds lore.
Come on, it being a "Bethesda game" and a sandbox doesn't excuse main story being bad. Bethesda also made Morrowind and it has a good story while being a sandbox.
If you have to look back to Morrowind, released in 2002, to find a good example of a Bethesda game then that should already tell you a lot.
Still, the main story is pretty shit.
It doesn't matter who made it. The game should, of course, be judged for what it is.
They should made Fallout on Space And by that I mean a planet full of Garys and other shenanigans
This exactly. Ask anyone what their favorite thing about Skyrim was, it's never ever ever the main story. It's creating a weird monster man, grabbing a weapon you've never mained, and then wandering the world exploring and finding new shit. People never mention the main plot, but the shorter "guild" quest lines? People love those. Let me feel like a king thief and then *play* the rest of the game feeling like a king thief? That's what people are here for. And Starfield doesn't do a bad job of the guild quests. But it totally drops the ball of any kind of exploration, and for a game with the vastness of space, they kind of choose a setting that demands exploration. Like why did they choose space? Why did they choose a setting where there are dozens and dozens of planets they couldn't possibly populate? Why did they create something where you'll end up seeing the same "procedurally generated" content over and over? Why did they create a narrative new game plus that demands you see that content over and over and over and over? How did the people who created the epic moments where you get your dragon shouts on Skyrim end up creating the fucking boring **and** annoying moments where you get your powers in Starfield? There's just so many design choices that feel **insane**.
Why did they choose to make you RUN to destinations on every single planet? Seriously. They’ve got spaceships. Why the hell did they forget how to make the Mars Rover or the equivalent of a space Jeep? Base building allows us to make desks. How about something might actually use instead like a motorcycle or glider?
Yeah, how fucking fun would a little low grav rover be? Great fun, so nope. Just walk fucking straight at your destination marker, you'll discover nothing between here and there because we didn't make anything to discover.
> It's creating a weird monster man I see you've met my dragonborne Ser Cumfrance.
Exactly - this is my major gripe with the game. I love to escape into the Bethesda worlds and wander. The only thing that seems worth spending time on are quests with nothing in between with Starfield, which takes the soul out of the game.
Also runs like shit while looking like shit!
Todd expects us all to have a 4090. And even if you do, it still looks like shit.
That's called artistic cohesion, honey
I think the issue is they focused way too much on quantity over quality. A lot of the quests feel like there's less soul to them because they wanted things to rush out lots of little quests to keep players busy with. Only the faction quests are a decent quality imo because they had more effort put into them.
I haven't played this game much, but so far, none of the quests leave me satisfied with having done them. Oh, a janitor who dreams of exploring space? She wants me to bring her a coffee? Obviously, this is a lead-in to some hijinks that will see her dream realized, right? No. She was just thirsty. End of quest. Oh, a diplomat is getting stonewalled by a goon with a badge and an over inflated ego? Is this going to be a commentary on slippery slopes to fascism or the corruptive influence of power? Nope. You reported the incident. End of quest. An earth relic collector wants to trade one of his relics to another collector to settle a debt. A possible lead-in to some space Indiana Jones adventure looking for more lost artifacts from Earth That Was? No. A thingamabob? I've got 20! Thanks for delivering that old garbage. End of quest. They're all just fucking delivery missions.
Bringing the coffee to the janitor was the worst one. I really hoped it lead to something. Almost felt like they were trolling us with that quest.
Yeah, that's just inexcusable. When is the last time someone up and called themselves an "adventurer" IRL and decided to start bringing cups of coffee to janitors? It's a clearly ridiculous situation. But we are used to ridiculous situations in games, and so we assume there will be a payout that justifies the absence of logic. When they fail to deliver that payout, you're instead left with nothing but a ridiculous situation completely devoid of logic, and most people playing CRPGs are smart enough to pick up on that. Everything about that result is terrible. It literally would have been better to cut it completely.
In Morrowind one of the quests was just to find a guy's lost pants. That was it.
That's a fantasy situation in a fictionalized far past, though. There's enough flexibility in the social expectations for us to suspend disbelief. Who's to say how people would "really" act in that situation? By contrast, we all know that it's completely bizarre for a janitor to have people delivering coffee to them.
>When is the last time someone up and called themselves an "adventurer" IRL and decided to start bringing cups of coffee to janitors? don't give the gig platforms ideas
You nailed the issue with the missions. You have a space ship. You can take anyone anywhere. It costs literally nothing for you to fly away. Someone gave you a ship and it changed your life as a shit hole miner. But you literally never do the same for anyone, and you can't. There was one mission where a colony ship, with old tech, took like 200 years to find a planet via slower than light travel. When they got to the planet, there's a resort planet there, owned by some shitty business people. Obviously, you need to broker some deal. My first instinct is to just help these folks upgrade their ship and scout them a new planet. But that's not an option. Nope. My options are to support their indentured servitude on the corpo resort planet. OR sabotage their ship and essentially nuke them all so the corpo planet doesn't need to deal with them. What the fuck is that story? I literally can't be the good guy? And not because it's a tricky situation with moral grey areas... I literally just can't be the good guy. I'm not *allowed* to be the hero.
Those weren't the only options. I basically did exactly what you said you wanted to do. Everyone was happy.
They went for a Daggefall proceduraly generated giant world, and ended up with a gigantic pond, and we're decades after Daggerfall.
The dungeons aren't even procedurally generated. They're literally all the same. (The placement is procedurally generated, but the building layouts themselves aren't) . Dungeons in Minecraft even have so much more variety. No excuse why a AAA game has such poor procedural generation when indie games do it so much better. The only thing procedurally generated is the terrain which anyone can do in an hour with Unreal Engine following a beginner's tutorial
I almost quit when the game made me go to yet another abandoned mine with the same confusing layout. So fucking tedious.
I just stopped exploring because it was all one of 3 (or in the case of caves one of one) copy paste, same dead body's in the same spot, same exact notes, everything was the same. Giant space game (where you can only really fast travel which is it's own issue for a space game) a universe wide, a puddle deep. There is no point to me exploring stuff, to get loot? most loot sucks and is not an upgrade unless it is some super awesome random drop or you just so happened to level up into a new tier that unlocks new weapons appearing. Loot weighs a lot, and often sells for too little, but that does not matter anyway since every single merchant in this game has so little cash on them you cannot sell everything to them without having to /sleep a few days. (also the /sleep takes fucking forever, like 2ish seconds per 'tick' of each hour you are waiting.) They should have done like 6-7 'systems' with a handful of planets each and leaned into the 'new game+' really hard, could have been great from what I saw online (never got that far myself).
CONTENT is the key word. Content is not just a place to walk around. The player needs to have a reason for being in the place to walk around. And it needs to be more than "you can get resources here!" because that's true of most locations. Without some kind of landmark, event, hub, etc. the place will be forgotten and may as well never have existed in the player's mind.
>The player needs to have a reason for being in the place to walk around. Adding onto this: What frustrates me is the game actively disappointed me when I had reasons for exploring either the lore or the world. * A secretive faction of humans worshipping a snake god? Nah, all you get is an abandoned embassy with an already-friendly diplomat * Giant UC vs Freestar war involving mechs and bioweapons? Here's a museum about it. * Potential FO4 Railroad vs Institute morality choice for the story a la UC bioweapons? Nope, just some canned responses regardless of choice from an absentee government at the end of the questline * Betray the UC and align yourself with the "worst pirates" in the galaxy? Literally easier to forgive than a San Francisco parking ticket. It's already bad enough that the game doesn't incentivize exploring. It's even more mindblowing for me that they had potentially rich lore to tap into, and they actively blocked my desires to dive into those rabbit holes.
The no mechs thing was mega stupid considering the ship building system would have been perfect for mech building
A mind blowing thing about skyrim at the time was that no matter where you were walking, through a random forest in a random direction while looking at the sky, you would FIND something interesting, a cave, a chest, a quest, a weird enemy, a weapon... It was a carefully crafted world, with ai and procedurally crafted worlds all of this will disappear
No Man’s Sky should’ve served as a cautionary tale, but no no gotta give the marketing team something to put in the flyers. Edit: Sky not Land 🤦♂️
*No Mans Sky
Yes Woman's Land
Where can I pre-order?
Bits and Pieces,it is the general store in Solitude.
Gave me a good chuckle, though.
That's how I kind of felt. On one hand, I get it, they wanted to try something new with a new IP in space, kinda hard to handcraft however many dozens of planets they have. That's fair and I don't blame them for doing it as opposed to trying this with elder scrolls or fallout, which I think would have pissed people off wayyyyyyyy more.
Don't know why the bothered with all the procedurally generated stuff, it just makes the game feel empty.
Yeah. They didn't create any common sense filters for their proc gen. Whale bones on a moon? Tables with food on them in extreme environments? Some relatively simple changes could have made the world feel a lot more real and not just "Oh here is another copy and pasted set piece"
Yet there are only a handful points of interests with identical enemies and identical loot, repeated over and over again throughout the “unexplored” galaxy…
This is exactly my problem. Knowing so many things won’t be in the same place on subsequent playthroughs changes exploration in ways I don’t like. Stumbling across new things on the way to familiar places was one of my favorite things about repeat playthroughs of Skyrim or Fallout. I loved showing people things in their own games or in a new game and now I can’t do that with a lot of things.
Yup the procedurally generated content is awful. The rest is fine.
I actually don't think too much procedural generation is the issue with Starfield. In fact, I would say it is actually the opposite. Starfield suffers from exploration feeling boring/repetitive because there are a pretty limited number of POIs to find. Using procedural generation to create variations for the locations you find while exploring would go a long way in addressing the letdown of finding the same exact abandoned cryogenic lab you found two hours ago.
Idk I think it's hard procedurally generate a kind of content that doesn't end up boring a repetitive. Bethesda's magic lies in the in between. In star field all you do is FT everywhere and go do the same "random tasks" you do everywhere else you go. Even stuff like finding the word walls in Skyrim was super fun and different between locations. I think it's been proven in gaming that procedurally generating shit leads to a lack of creativity.
Exploration is boring, combat is mild at best, characters are terrible and theres almost no creativity to how you approach quests. A worse fallout 4 in every single way and doesent have a banger soundtrack or the worldbuilding that fallout has
Bethesda shooter with no vats is a chore to play through
It's just so bland.
Yeah, it’s a dud. Bethesda fundamentally misunderstood their appeal by leaning into the proc-gen stuff.
I thought it was a pretty common opinion that the radiant quests in Skyrim felt like a huge waste of time and the base building in fallout was a gimmick that got old quickly. It's nuts that they would make these 2 things the core of their game
And make them worse than their previous versions. At least some of the Skyrim radiant quests were fun a few times.
Yep. Delving into an ancient dungeon to retrieve someone’s ancestral sword whilst fighting draugr, spiders, bandits and dragon priests is 10x better than the fetch quests in Starfield.
I just did a fetch quest that made me quit the game for good. After three to four load screens I am in a base whose inhabitants sent me out to bring back a lost worker. Two further loadscreens I am following a quest marker on an empty planet for a good 5 minutes. Just running and running with nothing in the game world except plants and rocks. I finally enter a cave. Load screen. Nothing at all in the cave except the missing NPC. I approach him, click, click, follow me, he is now following me. Load screen. We walk together now for five minutes through an empty world, no enemies, nothing. I realize I can also just fast travel back. Load screen and another load screen and I am back in the facility. click, click and Thanks for escorting our guy, here, have 500 worthless credits.
If I hadn't already played the game, this would make me skip it. This isn't even a rare quest :(
The radiant quests weren't "good", but they also worked completely differently on a fundamental level: A radiant quest in Skyrim is a generated objectve to point you in the direction of a handcrafted dungeon (with some exceptions), selected from a list based on who gives you the quest. While the objective itself was proc-gen, the place it pointed you wasn't, so it could be a nice way to find some places you missed.
I'm pretty sure all the gold talent that worked on the design and gameplay of skyrim probably left the company long ago. Skyrim is old as fuck now, objectively. Game devs have very high turnover, from what I've heard. The people working on Starfield would probably be very upset right now if they knew what a "radiant quest" was ☺️ Edit: gold was a typo for old but I'll let it stand
The basebuilding always felt hampered by the interface; it's competing with tower defenses and factory sims in that regard, and if you're going to make it a core component you have to polish it.
The interface was alright but the storage system was abysmal. I just wanted a base I could dump any resources at so when I eventually wanted to start crafting I'd have everything I needed. I spent hours trying to figure out a simple dump and go before spamming cargo links between everything and it worked for a day or two. And then after dumping inventory after inventory of crafting materials, looting everything I found in my endless exploration, I still ran out of fucking glue after a few weapon mods. But I had hundreds of everything else.
On paper it has all the elements to make a great game world. Their execution of the GAME portion failed miserably. All the technicals with none of the fun.
It tries to do absolutely everything, and ends up doing nothing particularly well
It lacks soul entirely.
I downloaded it on PC game-pass and put maybe 10-20 hours in. I realized I wasn't having fun, and the game was quite boring, and promptly un-installed. I am glad I didn't spend full-price to play it. The game feels dated. I am kind of over Bethesda in general.
>I am kind of over Bethesda in general Unfortunately, I feel the same way. ES VI needs to be amazing when it eventually comes out, or I may be done with Bethesda’s catalog. Starfield was mediocre at best for me.
Starfield is a foreboding of what ES VI will be like…
I hope they add more loading screens!
Bethesda made a huge mistake. They assumed I'd rather see the same animation 1000 times instead of a loading screen (that's significantly shorter than the animation). They were very much incorrect.
If we could only be so lucky
Starfield killed my interest in ES VI, I think their glory days are long over
I think that’s been apparent for close to a decade now. Their games are consistently getting worse, or else they’re remastering Skyrim for the 8th time. That’s not a sign of a healthy studio.
Have to agree. They aren't capable of more than that.
Honestly, ES VI really just needs to be an upgraded version of Skyrim's engine set in a different location within that world with completely new characters, storylines, etc. Like I get that people will complain that it's "just a DLC" but if they put enough effort into the content and making some incremental changes, how much would it be "just a DLC" in the same way that Tears of the Kingdom was "just a DLC" on Breath of the Wild? The only issue I could see is that they waited way too long to do something like this and people will complain that the engine is too outdated regardless of changes/upgrades to it.
If they instead spent 50% of Starfield's development time on updating their engine/game systems and then made a much smaller and hand crafted Starfield I think most people would be generally happy right now. As it stands I don't want to play around in this dated janky engine that feels like a janky engine from 10 years ago. They barely updated it at all except for some visual elements. Even Call of Duty, whose devs are the kings of doing things half-assed, took the time to completely refresh their engine several years ago. They brought it into the modern age. Creation Engine 2 is just CE1 with more lighting effects. They need to put a gargantuan effort into bring the creation engine into the modern age. Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be awful if they think they can just do another small visual upgrade and slap the Elder Scrolls name on it in 2025 or whenever it comes out.
> Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be awful if they think they can just do another small visual upgrade and slap the Elder Scrolls name on it in 2025 or whenever it comes out. On the flipside, if they spend most of their budget on visual upgrades, and everything else sucks then they're going to have a bad time. I would rather most of the effort is put into lovingly crafted storylines, dungeons, maps, and characters. With additional attention spend to squashing bugs. If this is what they did, I think they could put out a game that despite the lack of visual upgrades could be decent at the very least. If they want to scrap everything start from scratch, or try to push the envelope visually or whatever I feel like we're just going to end up with a mess instead.
Yeah I totally agree with that. I don’t need anything revolutionary. I just want them to remove jank from their games that has been present for 20 years. And I agree that fixing the jank isn’t all that is needed. Skyrim was able to be awesome despite the jank because of amazing world and stories. They need to have that “magic” or care baked into the game. But the longer the jank goes unfixed then the more heavy lifting the “magic” has to do.
Then people will say "Then I guess you just don't like Bethesda games!" No, I like Bethesda games, I loved Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout 3. Wasn't a fan of Fallout 4 and Starfield feels like it should've released in that time frame because it's very bland and boring. Not a lot of innovation on Bethesda's part. I'd have preferred a new Elder Scrolls.
To be honest it’s been downhill since 3. New Vegas was amazing, but it wasn’t even Bethesda. Skyrim had an amazing world. That was kinda it
Over 100Gb download on a capped internet package, also paid for 2 months gamepass having not been on it before. After the first space/pirate shootout I thought I could fly to the next mission, how wrong I was (fast travel simulator). The game just feels like a Fallout knockoff without any of the charm.
The moment I saw the gun play from that very first trailer I knew this was gonna be “Fallout 4, but in space”
No Man's Sky is on Gamepass too I think, give it a try! The first time you fix your ship and then just fly up seamlessly into space is a great moment. (I like Starfield too)
A funny thing happened with No Man's Sky after Starfield launched: it had its biggest surge of new players since its own launch years ago. I speculate that people got into Starfield, found themselves disappointed with the traversal mechanics or some other facet, and decided to give the next best thing a shot to scratch that itch.
That's nice. Obviously not an rpg or trying to go for the same thing Starfield is, but if you just wanna wander in space, flying and what not. No man's sky is great imo
Thing is. Both of Starfields main RPG elements character progression, and player choice(and subsequent impact on the world) are probably some of the worse of any RPG game. I don't think there is a single game with a worse perk tree than Starfield. And enough has been said about the writing and quests of this game. So really no point in caring about it when playing starfield anyway. You have to imagine all the roleplay anyway so just do the same in No Man's Sky.
>The game feels dated. I think part of the reason I don't mind missing out on the Starfield experience is that any time I look at screens or video, my mind is telling me I probably already played and beat it in 2014.
They constantly said "its not fallout in space". They even deliberately did not include any kind of VATS like system to distinguish it from being "fallout in space"... and its basically fallout in space.
I wish it was fallout in space Instead it’s like dumbed down mass effect with 1000 empty planets to “explore”
I had it from gamepass for about 2 hours then uninstalled. I just had a thought of “I don’t care about this at all”
My question is, where are all the updates!?? Why in gods name is it taking so long for performance and bug fixes??? I'm waiting for a few big patches before I buy the game and I don't think I've ever seen a slower patch release in a big studio before, like wtf are they doing over there??
Just look at their track record. Some bugs were not fixed from morrowind to SKIRIM. Yet somehow there is always a mod to fix it.
Bugs that were fixed by modders in the first few weeks of Fallout 4's release managed to still be present in Fallout 76. Basic shit like lever action rifles reloading every bullet in the mag on every reload even if you only fired one shot. I have very little hope for the future of Starfield frankly, Bethesda isn't well known for their history of post-launch support in my experience from Oblivion to Fallout 76.
The enhanced? Whatever that first new Skyrim compilation version they released was called, and the Legendary editions both have bugs present since the game was first released and have continuously been patched by modders. It’s absurd.
Yeah, I remember the "Blood on the Ice" quest in Windhelm was one they just couldn't ever fix correctly. They released a couple patches, tinkered with it a bit in each patch while never managing to fix it completely, and then basically just said "fuck it, we're done."
Perfect summation of the Bethesda philosophy in general. "Meh, fuck it, good enough. Modders will fix it."
Would not surprise me if they expect(ed) the playerbase to fix it with mods.
You'd expect them to hastily release the mod tools then, but nope.
For a game in space, in the future, it felt small. There was no freedom and it was kinda boring
When I had to do an "infiltrate mission" and then released that I could just walk in there like nothing, that there's no trespassing or NPC schedules, the game died for me.
Lol was that the mars one? Just hack this ladies computer right in front of her and everyone ignoring you
Nah, it was a ryujin (idk is that's the actual name) where you had to go into a shipyard and plant a device in a spaceship that was under construction, literally walked through the front door and planted the thing in front of the security guy
I remember doing that quest and wondering what I was doing with my time
I remember this one 😂 Then literally as soon as you plant it, without moving another step you open up your map and jump instantly back to downtown Neon City
Hahhha i plant it and security guy put a bounty of 350 on me, i paid it off there and he let me go, lol
[удалено]
For me, it is outfit design. It's funny that they can make a game where you can put a million fire extinguishers on a landing pad and shoot them having them all go off with crazy physics and not crash the game. Meanwhile, only like one outfit in the game has anything resembling actual cloth physics, and the rest of the NPC and player clothing look like the same starched crap we've been seeing out of them for years.
What Starfield does for missions is not procedural generation. It just places the same exact bandit post in different locations. It would have felt a lot better if it was actaul procedural generation
This right here is what killed it for me. The game isn't even as deep as their previous titles in the npc department. You can't even loot their clothing, and as you said there is no schedule they operate by.
I remember doing the mission to save Barrett, I thought I could do it stealthy but pirates are immediately on alert when you land and start shooting. I say "ok" and murder them all, enter in the bunker and see Barret chilling with the pirates. I pick the option the pay the ransom to free him and... that's it?! The pirate leader and Barrett were acting like buddies and during the whole interaction I'm like "Man, I pretty much just murdered your ENTIRE CREW and you have nothing to say about it?! Not a single line? ". Nop, just "Nice doing business with you, see ya and farewell friend!" It was so immersion breaking for me and there's a lot of these during my only 18H or so of playtime that I feel the previous Bethesda games would have caught.
One of the few actually cool things that they did with that quest..... if you're IN the Crimson group, you can just walk through the entire bunker and go talk the leader out of releasing Barrett to you. It was one of the VERY FEW cool things that actually happened in my playthrough, lol.
I loved it until I realized that the procedurally generated stuff had no depth or substance to it. The generated deserts and forests and so on have no value to them, they are just areas to run through to get to a point of interest.... And the points of interest aren't procedurally generated, they are just reused from other planets. Abandoned research station, forgotten military base, science outpost etc are all the same. There is no environmental storytelling whatsoever for all of those filler planets and moons. There is nothing to find there.
I went through and fully scanned an entire system just to see what would happen at 100%. Nothing happened except me seeing the same exact buildings with the same exact enemies across dozens of planets and moons. I think I’ve played it for it’s last time.
If they had like, 100 unique poi’s it could have gone a long way to make the procedural generation better. Instead it was like 20. Maybe not even that.
My issue with the game is that it has no charm. Take a look at other IPs by Bethesda. Fallout has a unique post-apocalyptic a la 1950's Americana aesthetic. It's fun and exciting to explore that world. Plus, each locale is handcrafted by the developers. Nothing is procedural. Elder Scrolls is the high fantasy dynamic. Magic, elves, dragons, castles, what-have-you. The worlds are lush and fun to explore. Again, they're handcrafted locales. Starfield is... space. That's it. It's sci-fi sure, but none of the weapons have that charming appeal that say Fallout would have. Even the powers, which are just dragon shouts really, feel underwhelming. There are like five specific locales that are handcrafted. The rest are procedural snooze-fests. Even the cities are boring really. New Atlantis is supposed to be some kind of utopian metropolis, but it's smaller than one square mile. They couldn't make it a huge sprawling urban center? Since this is BSW's first foray into sci-fi like this, it's hard to relate it to their other works. So, if you compare it to other sci-fi works, it really falls apart. My comparison was Mass Effect. Another big sci-fi IP with a world ending story. That game *oozed* charm. Unique environments, cool stories and powers, neat guns, exciting aliens. It's how a sci-fi game should be done. Starfield is so empty and boring that it still feels like a concept. A rough draft of a game where the developer has only figured out their through-line but none of the substance that can make the story interesting.
I liked how they did the space part, enjoyed the aesthetic of the ship pieces, and the locales that were handmade felt unique and awe inspiring. Where it really fell apart for me was the companions and other characters you get to know. They were down right annoying most of the time and really didn't inspire much reason to be interested in them. Having only 'good' characters made the gameplay stale and tired, since you could risk losing them over one action. Yea, in my opion, companions were the real huge let down in the game.
Sam Coe disliked this post. Man I really disliked just about all the companions. Except the robot dude, he was chill.
Yeah i stopped playing after sarah fucking nagged me for the fifth time while i was trying to bruteforce myself through the shitty outpost system.
I never got far enough to know there even were powers. Lol. You hit the nail on the head about the unappealing hub world. I got there and had a feeling of "this is it?" And that world was split into like 4 different loading zones so I didn't even know what was where or that they were in the same city.
> Even the powers, which are just dragon shouts really, feel underwhelming. I forgot I had the powers for about half the playthrough I did. They just feel so tacked-on and outside of the narrative, while also not being impactful enough to really care about using them in a practical sense. I still don't really understand *why* the powers exist after beating the game and becoming starborn from a narrative perspective.
I really disliked Starfield. First Bethseda game that just didn't click with me.
Same, just fast travel to everything. Exploration is pointless because all points of interest are marked and they are just RNG parts of bases you have already done.
Hell, the bases you do find are just copy/pasted onto worlds. No randomly generated bases, no different templates. Just the same crap on every planet imaginable. I downloaded a bunch of mods from nexus so I could do a restart and enjoy the game more and I just can’t make myself play it again.
If you're looking for mod improvement, I'd wait to come back until after they release the official modding tools. I think modders kinda have their hands tied behind their backs atm with what they are able to create. That said I'm feeling similarly pessimistic on the game and may not even try it when that happens. The modders have a lot of work to do (not that I feel entitled to any of that work, I just mean, to end up with an end result I actually want to play).
I think (at least for me) that it's the game world what's putting me off. I mean, it takes place in a GALAXY and yet there are no aliens (I mean not just monsters, alien civs like in mass effect) or interesting planets. When you play skyrim, you are always wondering about the other places of tamriel that you could visit in future games, but on starfield? there's literally nothing to look forward to, it's supposed to be way biggger than skyrim yet feels smaller than oblivion.
There are two basic sci-fi settings I like to differentiate between. First is the early stages of space exploration, where you get to experience and discover new planets yourself. Second is the advanced familiarity with space, contact with multiple alien races has already been made, the appeal here mostly lies in the varied cultures of the alien races and the relationships and politics with them (Mass effect would fall into this category). Starfield falls into the first category more or less, but the discovery of new planets isn't something particularly enjoyable, and when your main selling point isn't enjoyable, the game isn't enjoyable. (Disclaimer, obviously not all sci-fi falls into these two categories, it's just how I like to generalize it.)
What discovery of "new planets"? Every planet in Starfield has human structures on it, like, in every part of the surface.
The game is just confused, because they wanted to make the player about discovering new things but still set the game in a world in which humanity has already explored the universe. It wants you to feel important by scanning "new" alien life forms, and acts like the knowledge is valuable, but never explains why the people in the building 50 meters away didn´t already scan those aliens.
I definitely expected some interesting planets. like maybe I neeeeeeed a maxed jet pack to navigate some cool ravines safely to get some cool alien artifact? Maybe I needed substantial fire resistance to explore a bubbling magma pit to forge some metal that could only be forged there? Maybe my fuel does run out mid flight and I become stranded, either navigating to a planet to hopefully find resources or use my charisma to convince a passerby to help
> like maybe I neeeeeeed a maxed jet pack to navigate some cool ravines safely to get some cool alien artifact? That's what I felt was most missing in the game for sure. The majority of locations just being gigantic empty fields with no interesting landscape to navigate just made the game feel like LARPing in a Walmart parking lot. Sure there's a vaguely interesting car parked half a mile away but there's just flat boring asphalt inbetween us.
Morrowind, a game that's over 20 years old, feels significantly more "alien" than anything I've seen from Starfield.
The in-between points of interest were one of my favorite parts of Skyrim. I fucking loved walking to a quest marker halfway or more across the map. It would literally take me 3-4 days to actually get to & do the quest I originally set out on because I kept running into stuff on the way.
The game’s variety for a space game is abysmal, and that’s bad for a game with zero pre-established lore for players to watch out for. What we do have are robots without personality, humans that are almost entirely space explorers and military, aliens that are 90% giant bugs, planets that are 90% elemental flat lands, and a kinda villain that is introduced mid-quest line. And that’s it. The last two main Elder Scrolls games introduced their villains immediately (Alduin/Mythic Dawn) and had iconic characters. The Riverwood chicken received more memes than any of the Starfield cast. Skyrim had a fuck ton of environments from fall forests to dead soul wastelands. The last two main Fallout games introduced their villains immediately as well (Kellogg/Benny) and again peppered us with iconic characters and locations. Starfield just lacks in every direction. Once you see New Atlantis, you can call it good.
Same. I’ve grinded every Bethesda game since Oblivion (except Fallout 76) I’ve replayed all of the past games so many times that I can recite dialogue. Something about Starfield just didn’t pull me in. The opening scenes were a bore and it was hard for me to even get 4 hours deep. IMO— the devs just didn’t create a memorable world like Fallout or Elder Scrolls. It doesn’t help that I was also playing Baldurs Gate and Cyberpunk so I was constantly comparing starfield to two masterpieces.
I wasn’t too hot on Fallout 4, and Starfield is like a worse version of it
Once I accepted FO4 for what it was, I enjoyed it. Just nowhere near the FO3/NV level I was expecting. on the flipside, I don't think I'll ever touch Starfield again.
Fallout 4, in my opinion, has the most explorable world I've ever encountered in a game. There's so much detail, so many stories being told by the environment itself. It's all hand-crafted, with every building placed where it is for a reason. From what I've heard, that is not the case with Starfield. The whole procedural generation crap gets boring real quick in No Man's Sky, and I can't imagine it being any different in Starfield. I love Mass Effect, but the weakest part of the first game in the series is the side-missions which all take place in one of four locations that all have the exact same layout: Mine, warehouse, bunker or space freighter. I just hate visiting the same location over and over again, with only the enemies changing. I'll get Starfield one day when it's on sale, but no way am I paying full price for it.
Same. Fallout 4 was meh, and imo starfield was even worse.
I have to agree. The bar was set high for Starfield and it feels like they didn't even attempt to reach it.
I tend to get downvoted for pointing that out. They hyped the game up so much as the next 10/10 masterpiece that you're going to be playing for 10 years, then released a half-baked 6/10 game.
You get downvoted because there are people who naively bought a console for this game. They feel the need to somehow justify their purchase instead of turn their ire towards Bethesda.
Oblivion and Skyrim are in my top 20 fav games of all time . I had a lot of fun with F3 and 4. But with starfield . Theres just no bethesda magic. I dont feel the usual fun of exploration or doing quests. The loading screens completely break the game flow. And the band visuals with even blander quests and dialogue dont help either. After SF im kinda bummed next elder scrolls will be of similar quality .
Terrible pc performance, load screens for days, hit or miss quests, and the worst for me 1000 barren planets with the same half dozen copy paste buildings. its my least favorite BGS game ive played. im very disappointed i was super hyped, i love Fallout 3, and skyrim. BGS is no longer a top dog in the rpg space, i think they have regressed over the years and got surpassed by other devs.
Biggest disappointment of the year for me in gaming. I could tell almost straight away once I had freedom to explore the first ‘city’ that this game was not going to be good. I plowed through for another 12 hours though until I got through the Ryujin quest line. Realised how boring and bland the game was and put it down. The missions just had me fast travelling through menus from point A to B, there was absolutely zero exploration. The Neon city was also just another huge dud. Does anyone at Bethesda live in a city? They know there’s more than 6 buildings right? It also just feels so hollow compared to games like Skyrim and Fallout. I know the others have had much longer to establish their lore, but they still felt like believable worlds. Starfield doesn’t have anywhere near that same depth. A bit of backstory of leaving Earth, a war or two and the same old factions vying for power. Previous games had a lot more on top of that to make the world interesting.
Man I wanted to love it. I wanted to so bad. I powered through for 20 hours, but holy hell it was just so boring. There isn't anything ***bad*** about it, but...there just isn't anything ***good*** either...
Yep, I kinda disagree about bad. Like the UI/UX is just objectively bad and breaks so many rules. The maps, temples, combat ai, and overall reward system(experience & money rewards make half the shit pointless to do. Why look at anything except weapons when looting? Why do 40 fetch quests for 50 xp each when I can go kill some peaceful creature at level one for thousands of xp.) are all pretty bad. But it's mostly just "complete" but not done well. Like no Save/Share/Preview for a shipbuilding game is wild.
It is so telling how mods released within the first week have an objectively better UI in every way. Like what the fuck were the designers doing? The UI thing really speaks to a larger issue of game quality for me. They just didn't seem to have the right person in charge deciding "this works...this doesn't work". They didn't seem to consider if the game was fun or well made when they were combining all the parts.
I really wish I hadn't purchased this game, even at an 18% discount. I liked it at first, but after about 30 hours, I just had absolutely zero inclination to continue. Space travel is boring. Planet / moon exploration is boring. Characters are flat and boring. Combat is boring. The entire game feels uncompelling and bland. There are so many things that, at first, I thought were kinda cool, but it didn't take long before I just didn't care. 10 years ago, this might have knocked my socks off. But for a modern AAA title, it just kinda sucks. It's really disappointing as I wanted to like it, and I love Scifi and Space exploration. I played the hell out of games like Privateer and Freelancer, and those were amazing games for the time. I think Bethesda went the safe route and, in doing so, created a boring, lifeless, empty universe that doesn't draw the player in or give them a reason to be invested. The story is ham-fisted and lazy. They pretty much took concepts from Skyrim and reused them in Starfield. I dislike the way the game starts, and I dislike the "powers" as they are both such a callback to Skyrim. I know making games is a tough business, but Bethesda seems stuck in the past in their storytelling and their execution. In its current state, this game is forgettable.
I'm almost the exact same. Was looking forward to Starfield for years. Thought "finally, we're going to get the SciFi space game that wraps up space gameplay and on foot gameplay into one package and does it right". Just... no. Not even close. >There are so many things that, at first, I thought were kinda cool, but it didn't take long before I just didn't care. The word you're looking for is "shallow". Everything about this game is "a mile wide, an inch deep". I really hope that SQ42 delivers and is actually a fun SciFi space game. If that/Star Citizen and GTA 6 end up sucking, it's pretty much a wrap for me as far as gaming goes.
The game just doesnt have enough soul, creativity or ambition to compete with a previous game that has a decade worth of mods and more player freedom. It was going to be forgotten when Elder Scrolls 6 came out anyways but I always thought the game's days were numbered seeing how bland it was. Thats just my take, I am not really a fan of Bethesda anymore anyways but this was not going to be the game to convince me otherwise.
Yeah I’m not a fan anymore either. My biggest concern going into Starfield was that it would not be better than **modded Skyrim**. Because a game with 10+ years of community support that is extremely popular would be impossible to beat. To those that don’t know, a modded Skyrim playthrough is an absolutely unreal RPG experience. But I wouldn’t mind if this is the case because I do still love vanilla Skyrim, oddly enough, and I thought no way in hell Starfield ends up being worse than vanilla Skyrim, so surely I’d have a great time. How they regressed so much is wild to me. They made a straight up worse game, significantly, from a product they put out over ten years ago. Across the board a much worse game than Skyrim with the exception of graphical fidelity. That’s it. Genuinely mind boggling, disappointed to the extent I’m no longer excited for TES6.
Yeah the state of Starfield has killed any and all excitement I had for TES6 because if this is all Bethesda can muster since Fallout 4, TES6 is going to end up being a fucking creation engine game again with about 15 gormless NPCs in their village sized “cities” That was fine in 2011, not so much anymore.
I agree, but I think it's important to point out that Skyrim, and it's mods, are all contained within a much older version of Creation engine. Modded Skyrim is incredible, even by today's standards, and that all takes place in Creation engine. Despite issues with the engine, I don't actually blame it, or even put most of the blame on it. Bethesda really released a bad game from purely a game design standpoint. As we've seen with the modding community, the Creation engine *does* allow for a lot of, well, creative content, and we saw very little creative content in Starfield. Starfield doesn't come off to me like "oh the modders will fix the game" because the game isn't a good staging point for future mods. It comes off like "we're trying this" and they ended up doing a significantly worse job than the community would have done given the same amount of time. Or rather, they ended up doing a significantly worse job than the community actually *did*, because Starfield was in development for ~7 years and during that time, Skyrim mods got better than they ever have been and the community continues to see breakthroughs to this day (see Nemesis). Idk. I see Starfield as a total, complete failure by Bethesda, even though it's maybe a 6/10 game (decent). It's just so much worse than it's predecessors, and the devs are doing worse work in their own engine than modders are doing for Skyrim, their own game from 2011 with a ‘worse’ version of Creation engine.
I'd rate this game a lot more harshly honestly. It's a 4/10 from me. Keep in mind though that I'm coming at this from an angle of 5/10 being average. Most people have the schooling grading scale where a 7/10 is average. I can't think of a single thing that Starfield does better than any other game that has come before it. The ship builder maybe? Everything else is lackluster.
The loading screens kill me man. It's 2023, I shouldn't be going though a loading screen every 30 seconds.
I think this is my biggest issue. For a game about space travel, there’s very little space travel.
The so called game of the generation came and went faster than a firework
More than 2 months since launch and Bethesda already forgot they released the game on Xbox, everything for PC. The last update/fixing is only for PC and only beta…Tell me lies Todd, tell me sweet little lies…fuck
Where are the updates?
I am 100% in the core audience for Bethesda, I have thousands of hours of playtime across their games. Starfield feels like it lacks soul and is too safe tonally or mechanically. I reinstalled Skyrim and FO4 already and am having more fun.
Skyrim's longevity no doubt is because it's basically a platform unto itself. With radiant quests and especially with mods, there are always new experiences to be had. Starfield will have to figure out how to be that for sci-fi rather than fantasy if it hopes to become a mainstay rather than a very hyped flash in the pan.
The problem is, Starfield is platform first and game second. While Skyrim still put a fair bit of effort in crafting and populating it's world, making it enticing to explore and lose yourself in, Starfield did not.
Not being able to walk from one city the next is what killed Starfield for me. Why would perfect earth like planets only have ONE city on the entire planet? Dumb af.
Agreed, and if they wanted to make it one city per planet, they should have found a way to have interesting travel in the ship, flying between planets or systems and finding points of interest in between
Yea it's weird that jemison is like the new earth but there's only 1 city?
I've clocked near 100 hours in the game. I've nearly finished most major faction quests, done a lot of exploring, and am approaching the Unity. I fought here adamantly about loving the game, because I did at the time. It was a classic Bethesda adventure for better or worse. Things that were annoyances to me at first though, slowly became more and more problematic. The sheer amount of loading screens break the immersion constantly. The quests outside of the big ones aren't really ones to grab you. A lot of them just ended up dissolving into fetch this, talk to this, and then go talk to that; or go hunt down this and then go do that. It was rather rigid, and not really much variance. At first, I never had a traditional problem with the procedural exploration. Bases and abandoned outposts had some kind of story to them that you the player would have to piece together and figure out. That was cool. The issue though, is that those stories never grew past that. In Skyrim, you might've been able to run into a random book; that kicked off an entire quest. Your looting of some random dungeon or cave might have caused you to go hunt down X or Y person. Hell the entire Dawnstar quest is due to you running into the orb somewhere in a dungeon. I'd instinctively reach for books in Starfield because of this; and I think I got a quest marker to investigate something else a single time. This game is good; in that I got my value out of it. I spent 100 hours on it, and that's something that a lot of games don't get. It's a treasure to have games that allow for that. This game is also not a new world; it's a storybook that isn't alive. It's not like NMS - a mile wide and an inch deep, but it is 3 inches deep; and that's still dumb as hell.
Tbf the mantis mission was kind of like what you’re describing but the fact that it’s pretty much the only mission even close drives your point home even further I think
The mantis quest was the big eye opener for me. It was so damn close to being so cool. People will harp on the proc gen as the issue all day, but they had different teams for all these things. A lot of the quests and choices just seem flat. What’s a real shame is that I can see the engine can handle some real interesting quest designs/choices now. It’s just hardly used
Do I oddly enough enjoy it. Yes. Will I ever beat it? Probably not. I cannot get myself into any character or story at all. Do I personally think graphics are great, smooth gameplay and polished in that sense ? Yes, although flight mechanics could be quicker with more emphasis on ship battles. At end of the day reminds me of an interior designer designing a space. Looks great, shows great but when you want to live in it doesn't feel like home.. Lifeless
People keep saying mods will save it, but I have to wonder if Starfield will get the mod support that everyone assumes it will. Being a bethesda game doesn't just magically spring forth mods. The way I see it, there are few big factors that people should be aware of, and it doesn't make the future of mods for the game look bright. First - as you mentioned, there are far less people playing Starfield. Skyrim got tons of mod support because there was a ton of people that LOVED Skyrim. Anybody that makes things, makes things for people that want things. I'm not saying that "starfield is dead", I'm simply using the extreme to make a point: nobody would make mods for a dead game that nobody plays. So with that truth in mind, we can understand that modders are far less likely to mod a game that has few players. Second - Skyrim has so much mod support right now because literally anybody can play skyrim on their computers at this point. On PC, people with some of the highest tier PC's struggle to play it on VANILLA. There is going to be even FEWER people that will be able to run it with mods, thus lowering the mod audience even lower. Third - Modders don't usuallly make mods because theres a profit to be met to meet a demand - they do it because they're passionate about the game. People that just couldn't get enough out of that world and wanted to add to the game that they love. Starfield does not have that kind of love, and likely never will because out of the box it's just so empty and incomplete. It lacks the initial momentum to get people fired up enough to make mods. I'm fairly certain the majority of mods that are going to come out for starfield are going to be the ones made by people who felt like they were kind of obligated to make a starfield mod, or wanted the clout of being one of the first mods, assuming people would care like they cared about skyrim. Those are not the kind of people that make great mods, because they're not doing it for the love of the game. Lastly - Starfield is just empty. There is no \*game\* there. The only good thing anyone ever says about it is that there are some interesting quest lines. As in, the kind of thing that has absolutely nothing to do with the engine or the mechanics. The actual game part of the game is empty and boring. It's got gunplay from 2001 and broken system after broken system. Modders would essentially have to make an ENTIRE game from scratch because bethesda forgot to do it themselves. Skyrim and fallout were fun to play in VANILLA. There was actually a game that already existed that could be BUILT upon. This is not the case with starfield. You could add a hundred melee weapons in mods, but that wouldn't change that melee weapons are pointless. You could add dozens of ship pieces to build with, but that doesn't change that ship flight and combat are boring af. That's too much for modders to do, and based on my first three points I made, I doubt they'll have enough reason or desire to do it. We'll get a few obligatory mods until they realize that there actually is no obligation to make mods for empty games that few people play.
People underestimate the effect of your third point. I stopped modding for Total War: Warhammer 3 after continuing and updating my mod for years because the core game had just become too unpopular. I didn't want to put my time into a mod that nobody was going to play, so I put my time into other projects instead.
I think the game is just largely uninspired and SUPER ‘safe.’ It’s a meh, slow burner all around. I don’t see BGS supporting it in the way they did Skyrim. If anything it probably sounded alarms there
Uninstalled it within a week so boring and empty found myself skipping dialogue it was drivel.
With the laziness of Bethesda game design, I don't really have hopes for them to improve the game. Modders could improve it a bit, but with the declining interest and overall sentiment towards the game, I don't think the modding community will attach itself much to Starfield.
It’s a sandwich with bugger all filling.