Aside from completely redesigning the world and side quests, there’s nothing they can tack on to the game as is that would make it worth playing again. It’s boring and missing the one thing they actually did pretty well in everything else: environmental storytelling. You can’t exactly use environmental story-telling when your game’s environment is mostly randomly generated; which is what all the areas outside the main cities are. Randomly generated set-pieces that are scattered around an otherwise empty planet.
I thought the one thing everyone agreed was done well in their last games was “pick any direction, you’ll find something interesting”. Which is also missing on this game
I would rather play Outer Worlds than Starfield, and I hated Outer Worlds because it was sold to me as being Fallout 4 with a better dialogue system and it’s not even remotely different. Like everyone complained that FO4 only had 3 choices “Yes, no, and funny yes” but that’s exactly how it’s done in Outer Worlds, too.
Yall are getting downvoted, but I think it’s great that you have a game you like. I can even see the perspective of this being a better Outer Worlds. I think people like myself are just upset that we didn’t get scifi skyrim. Just saying “scifi skyrim” got me excited again for a game that they unfortunately did not release. Don’t take the downvotes personally imo, people are just mad at Bethesda.
Yall are getting downvoted, but I think it’s great that you have a game you like.
100%. I get baffled that Starfield gets so much hate, but then some of my favorite games aren’t very popular (Book of Hours anyone? lol)
I can even see the perspective of this being a better Outer Worlds
Yeah. Outer world was in reality the polar opposite of Starfield. A game that was excessively theme-driven but had lackluster “everything else” to go with it. A little (less than Outer Worlds used) bit of tongue-in-cheek “Spacer’s Choice” could have worked like Vault Boy does in Fallout, and I wish Starfield had done something like that. But on story and gameplay alone, Starfield destroys Outer Worlds.
I think people like myself are just upset that we didn’t get scifi skyrim
This is the funny part. If I had to describe why I love Starfield to someone who had been living under a rock and hadn’t ever heard of it, I’d say “because it’s like Skyrim in space”. In so many ways, if I’m being honest.
The thing is, the biggest critique people have against Starfield isn’t all the crazy bugs (we remember those from Skyrim) or the really tropey shit, some skyrimmy feature it’s missing, or anything in between. It’s that they don’t find Starfield “fun” in this hard-to-place sort of way. Perhaps that’s you? If so, maybe you can see how someone would feel about Starfield if, for some reason, it clicked as fun from the start.
Now, I have some complaints about Starfield. But most of them have to do with things that Skyrim didn’t even try (the shipbuilder, which I hear has improved of late) or the lategame (which means I got my fun out of it).
Also, I’ve learned not to take downvotes too badly most of the time. Everyone has opinions, and just because I reserve downvote for the rare “this person is an absolute idiot” doesn’t mean other people do :)
Yeah I’d say it was an issue of not “clicking” at first, but I think I defined it a bit more before I dropped my first playthrough. For me, the primary appeal of a Bethesda RPG is that “take off in a direction, you’ll find a story” feel. Starfield kinda has it, but they broke it up with weird design choices. The insanely frequent, lengthy cutscenes cut into the continuous flow. Having to travel at all between planets broke up the action and flow. The choice to use procedural generation was odd and really took away from the more intentional feel of prior Bethesda games, and really cut away some of the quality and quantity of environmental storytelling.
That’s my very surface level opinions from what I remember. It’s been a minute since I played it at release.
For me, the primary appeal of a Bethesda RPG is that “take off in a direction, you’ll find a story” feel
I don’t entirely disagree.
The insanely frequent, lengthy cutscenes cut into the continuous flow
You mean the ship going into warp or landing loading screen? There aren’t really a ton of cutscenes. If I had to give a tedious downside, it would be the “power minigame” but at least it ends with a violent encounter with a strongish enemy 9 times out of 10
The choice to use procedural generation was odd and really took away from the more intentional feel of prior Bethesda games
See, THIS might be where my age plays me. My first Bethesda game was called “Arena”, and it was all procedural. My second Bethesda game was “Daggerfall” and it was ABSURDLY huge procedural. I’ve never seen some procedural elements as a downside to extend the plot (and in fact, Skyrim’s radiant quest system is procedure), as long as there was sufficient hand-made content.
Now here’s the thing. By all reports (both self-reports that can be questioned, but also people who dug into game files), Starfield has more handmade content than Skyrim. It’s just that the thousand planets above and beyond that were procedural. I LIKE that balance. A lot. It solves the “Morrowind problem” (Morrowind was slammed at first because the world was SO much smaller than Daggerfall’s) for me while still giving you 60-80 hours of handcrafted stories, characters, maps, etc. But I can see how other people who dive into into the procedural content might step back and say “boy this game is so reptitious”. Sometimes our gameplay loops define our enjoyment. I know I hated Persona 2 for years for the dumbest reason ever - I got addicted to the casino minigame and lost track of the story, then found the casino game too tedious and I had no desire to play the game anymore.
They’re procedurally generated, but I never got a whiff of them being randomly generated. Are you sure? And even if they were, it’s not incompatible with environmental storytelling if those things are components in their model for generating environments.
The terrain isn’t but the POIs are randomly placed. When you open the scanner and see things like “man-made structure” or “cave” or whatever; those are all random and won’t be in the same place for every new game.
Gotcha, I didn’t know that, but I guess it feeds into their new game plus mechanic. To be clear, I don’t believe that stuff sucks because it’s random; it sucks because it was poorly crafted. You can do good environmental storytelling even when the environment is determined by RNG (Dwarf Fortress and Shadows of Doubt both do), and you can have manual, hand-crafted content that sucks (like every non-faction quest in Starfield…why are we still doing thoughtless, boring fetch quests in 2023?!).
The side quests definitely were also lacking. Like, I know there’s only about 4 archetypes of quests (fetch, escort, kill and checkpoint) that you can really do, but you make them interesting with the story and reasons for doing the thing. Starfield really just made a majority of quests “go get this mcguffin because we need mcguffins,” with nothing really cool or interesting about it.
DF was 100% designed around telling a story using RNG. Game is like a mad lib. Starfield didn’t go that far (most games don’t). I actually do not ever expect AAA games with procedural generation to do more than just give you endless repetition over randomness that generate compelling and unique “stories” the way DF or RimWorld do.
One of them was literally just to press 4 buttons and then talk to a guy again. I don’t know who at Bethesda thought these quests were even worth putting in the game.
I don’t know if they wanted to be funny or if even the designers themselves just employed the puzzle because it doesn’t need logic to be defeated if you just keep mashing buttons at random. lol
And at this points it’s honestly a pretty damn decent and fun game. At its core it’s fallout 4 on a server. Improved legendary system, one of if not the best map of any fallout, the best radio, some great quests and content. It’s absolutely worth trying out at this point for any fallout fan that hasn’t. Yeah it’s still not perfect and I wish I could actually pause, and it can be a bit hard at times but it’s total scratches the fallout itch even if just randomly exploring and not really doing quests. I also never really interacted with other players
I am replaying Skyrim at the moment. When you start the game after being cut loose after Helgen, you have a quest that nudges you towards Whiterun. The typical path usually goes Helgen - > Riverwood - > Whiterun. Between any of these three steps, you can veer off the track and find some cool stuff to do. Just near Helgen, there’s a fortress near the Cyrodiil Border, Embershard Mine, random bandit encampments, and if you are brave enough at level 1, Bleak Falls Barrow. You can play all of this without ever having to pause the game.
Starfield has none of that. When you land on a new planet, all of the caves are the same. There’s no environmental storytelling, and in order to fast travel, you must stop the flow of the game.
Hard to say if has been profitable as it was in development for a long time. However it probably sold well on the account that people trusted Bethesda to make a Bethesda experience. They effectively traded their remaining good will for sales.
Yeah maybe a standalone expansion that is way more fun than the original kinda like far cry 3 blood dragon. Use the core of an awful game to make something fun.
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is it good writers? were they hiding this whole time, and ready to finally come out and rewrite the entire game?
played for about 20hrs and put it down never to be picked up again most boring space game ever
Yeah, that’s what they have been saying for years
I just want to know when it’s going start being fun.
I hear they’re going to release a patch for that on June 31st.
Entire dev team about to be fired
Aside from completely redesigning the world and side quests, there’s nothing they can tack on to the game as is that would make it worth playing again. It’s boring and missing the one thing they actually did pretty well in everything else: environmental storytelling. You can’t exactly use environmental story-telling when your game’s environment is mostly randomly generated; which is what all the areas outside the main cities are. Randomly generated set-pieces that are scattered around an otherwise empty planet.
I thought the one thing everyone agreed was done well in their last games was “pick any direction, you’ll find something interesting”. Which is also missing on this game
Strange. I have more playtime in starfield than Skyrim. And the thing that draws me in is the story.
It’s like it got most things right that Outer Worlds got wrong.
As someone just finishing up a first playthrough of The Outer Worlds, I might have to watch for a Starfield sale.
I would rather play Outer Worlds than Starfield, and I hated Outer Worlds because it was sold to me as being Fallout 4 with a better dialogue system and it’s not even remotely different. Like everyone complained that FO4 only had 3 choices “Yes, no, and funny yes” but that’s exactly how it’s done in Outer Worlds, too.
Yall are getting downvoted, but I think it’s great that you have a game you like. I can even see the perspective of this being a better Outer Worlds. I think people like myself are just upset that we didn’t get scifi skyrim. Just saying “scifi skyrim” got me excited again for a game that they unfortunately did not release. Don’t take the downvotes personally imo, people are just mad at Bethesda.
100%. I get baffled that Starfield gets so much hate, but then some of my favorite games aren’t very popular (Book of Hours anyone? lol)
Yeah. Outer world was in reality the polar opposite of Starfield. A game that was excessively theme-driven but had lackluster “everything else” to go with it. A little (less than Outer Worlds used) bit of tongue-in-cheek “Spacer’s Choice” could have worked like Vault Boy does in Fallout, and I wish Starfield had done something like that. But on story and gameplay alone, Starfield destroys Outer Worlds.
This is the funny part. If I had to describe why I love Starfield to someone who had been living under a rock and hadn’t ever heard of it, I’d say “because it’s like Skyrim in space”. In so many ways, if I’m being honest.
The thing is, the biggest critique people have against Starfield isn’t all the crazy bugs (we remember those from Skyrim) or the really tropey shit, some skyrimmy feature it’s missing, or anything in between. It’s that they don’t find Starfield “fun” in this hard-to-place sort of way. Perhaps that’s you? If so, maybe you can see how someone would feel about Starfield if, for some reason, it clicked as fun from the start.
Now, I have some complaints about Starfield. But most of them have to do with things that Skyrim didn’t even try (the shipbuilder, which I hear has improved of late) or the lategame (which means I got my fun out of it).
Also, I’ve learned not to take downvotes too badly most of the time. Everyone has opinions, and just because I reserve downvote for the rare “this person is an absolute idiot” doesn’t mean other people do :)
Yeah I’d say it was an issue of not “clicking” at first, but I think I defined it a bit more before I dropped my first playthrough. For me, the primary appeal of a Bethesda RPG is that “take off in a direction, you’ll find a story” feel. Starfield kinda has it, but they broke it up with weird design choices. The insanely frequent, lengthy cutscenes cut into the continuous flow. Having to travel at all between planets broke up the action and flow. The choice to use procedural generation was odd and really took away from the more intentional feel of prior Bethesda games, and really cut away some of the quality and quantity of environmental storytelling.
That’s my very surface level opinions from what I remember. It’s been a minute since I played it at release.
I don’t entirely disagree.
You mean the ship going into warp or landing loading screen? There aren’t really a ton of cutscenes. If I had to give a tedious downside, it would be the “power minigame” but at least it ends with a violent encounter with a strongish enemy 9 times out of 10
See, THIS might be where my age plays me. My first Bethesda game was called “Arena”, and it was all procedural. My second Bethesda game was “Daggerfall” and it was ABSURDLY huge procedural. I’ve never seen some procedural elements as a downside to extend the plot (and in fact, Skyrim’s radiant quest system is procedure), as long as there was sufficient hand-made content.
Now here’s the thing. By all reports (both self-reports that can be questioned, but also people who dug into game files), Starfield has more handmade content than Skyrim. It’s just that the thousand planets above and beyond that were procedural. I LIKE that balance. A lot. It solves the “Morrowind problem” (Morrowind was slammed at first because the world was SO much smaller than Daggerfall’s) for me while still giving you 60-80 hours of handcrafted stories, characters, maps, etc. But I can see how other people who dive into into the procedural content might step back and say “boy this game is so reptitious”. Sometimes our gameplay loops define our enjoyment. I know I hated Persona 2 for years for the dumbest reason ever - I got addicted to the casino minigame and lost track of the story, then found the casino game too tedious and I had no desire to play the game anymore.
They’re procedurally generated, but I never got a whiff of them being randomly generated. Are you sure? And even if they were, it’s not incompatible with environmental storytelling if those things are components in their model for generating environments.
The terrain isn’t but the POIs are randomly placed. When you open the scanner and see things like “man-made structure” or “cave” or whatever; those are all random and won’t be in the same place for every new game.
Gotcha, I didn’t know that, but I guess it feeds into their new game plus mechanic. To be clear, I don’t believe that stuff sucks because it’s random; it sucks because it was poorly crafted. You can do good environmental storytelling even when the environment is determined by RNG (Dwarf Fortress and Shadows of Doubt both do), and you can have manual, hand-crafted content that sucks (like every non-faction quest in Starfield…why are we still doing thoughtless, boring fetch quests in 2023?!).
The side quests definitely were also lacking. Like, I know there’s only about 4 archetypes of quests (fetch, escort, kill and checkpoint) that you can really do, but you make them interesting with the story and reasons for doing the thing. Starfield really just made a majority of quests “go get this mcguffin because we need mcguffins,” with nothing really cool or interesting about it.
DF was 100% designed around telling a story using RNG. Game is like a mad lib. Starfield didn’t go that far (most games don’t). I actually do not ever expect AAA games with procedural generation to do more than just give you endless repetition over randomness that generate compelling and unique “stories” the way DF or RimWorld do.
One of them was literally just to press 4 buttons and then talk to a guy again. I don’t know who at Bethesda thought these quests were even worth putting in the game.
“Just hit them randomly until the door opens!”
I don’t know if they wanted to be funny or if even the designers themselves just employed the puzzle because it doesn’t need logic to be defeated if you just keep mashing buttons at random. lol
They had an opportunity to make Fallout 5, but instead they chose this. It’s been 9 years Bethesda, 9 YEARS.
They made 76, and apparently it’s a big financial success
And at this points it’s honestly a pretty damn decent and fun game. At its core it’s fallout 4 on a server. Improved legendary system, one of if not the best map of any fallout, the best radio, some great quests and content. It’s absolutely worth trying out at this point for any fallout fan that hasn’t. Yeah it’s still not perfect and I wish I could actually pause, and it can be a bit hard at times but it’s total scratches the fallout itch even if just randomly exploring and not really doing quests. I also never really interacted with other players
Cries in elder scrolls
… aaand it’s layoffs.
Big layoffs
How about they make the game fun?
I am replaying Skyrim at the moment. When you start the game after being cut loose after Helgen, you have a quest that nudges you towards Whiterun. The typical path usually goes Helgen - > Riverwood - > Whiterun. Between any of these three steps, you can veer off the track and find some cool stuff to do. Just near Helgen, there’s a fortress near the Cyrodiil Border, Embershard Mine, random bandit encampments, and if you are brave enough at level 1, Bleak Falls Barrow. You can play all of this without ever having to pause the game.
Starfield has none of that. When you land on a new planet, all of the caves are the same. There’s no environmental storytelling, and in order to fast travel, you must stop the flow of the game.
It’s not fair saying the game isn’t fun. Millions of people had fun trashing it over social media. It’s just passively fun.
It’s bugs, they’re cooking up more bugs
Did starfield become profitable? Did they cover their develop and marketing costs yet?
Hard to say if has been profitable as it was in development for a long time. However it probably sold well on the account that people trusted Bethesda to make a Bethesda experience. They effectively traded their remaining good will for sales.
Starfield was a gamepass game, so it entered the vague subscription zone. Microsoft seemed happy with it.
can’t wait, i know everyone else here hates it, but Starfield was EXACTLY the kind of game I like, I still play it often and love getting lost in it.
Starfield Online (with microtransactions).
Is it a different, better game?
My first thought too
Yeah maybe a standalone expansion that is way more fun than the original kinda like far cry 3 blood dragon. Use the core of an awful game to make something fun.
The player will be thrilled when they release it.