Fans patching the Bethesda games is as at least as old as Daggerfall, if not earlier. Daggerfall didn’t have Helseth and Barenziah as Dark Elves until fans fixed it. Pickpocketing in Morrowind is broken unless you use the code patch. The Oblivion leveling problem punishes you for playing the game.
Like every guide for every Bethesda game is going to start with download this unofficial patch, and the unofficial patches for the DLC, and this installer. They’ve relied on fans and treated the community like it’s an FOSS community, without realizing that without good product, the volunteers won’t come.
Yes, but that shouldn’t be the norm, or an expectation, of the developer. “Oh, we don’t need to worry about the game, the fans will just mod it and it’ll bring us lots of money!”
The problems with Starfield aren’t so much the bugs as they are fundamental, often dated, design issues. Here’s a sort of Let’s Play from a podcast I follow with one guy who loves trying to bend sandbox simulations to the point of breaking and a gal who writes comedy. Around the 10m mark, you can start to see where this sandbox should have accounted for this kind of play. If you can’t simultaneously do that while making a galaxy with 1000 planets, then you should probably scope down until you can. Starfield is not a terrible game, but Bethesda needs to evolve.
It can be both. It was impressive when Oblivion had 7 different interlocking systems but none of them were particularly good, but these days, I think we expect at least one or two of them to be significantly better.
The story is bad, the ship’s weapons selection is terrible, the outposts are almost useless, the temples are ridiculous, the powers are mostly unnecessary and soooo mmmaaannnyyy loading screens….
It’s been clear for over a decade that the Creation Engine (let’s be honest it’s still Gamebryo) has run its course. It is not a viable option for a modern game anymore. It has architectural limitations that simply prevent a modern gaming experience.
There have been so many Creation Engine apologists since Oblivion trying to justify its continued existence through multiple new Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, always trying to say that it’s fine. Starfield was the chance to prove that the limitations aren’t actually architectural and that it could be used for a modern game. Clearly that’s not the case. Taking just about any other modern open world RPG to directly compare, Starfield feels like crap in comparison. Hell, even the launch version of Cyberpunk felt better than Starfield does now.
It’s been clear for over a decade that the Creation Engine (let’s be honest it’s still Gamebryo) has run its course. It is not a viable option for a modern game anymore. It has architectural limitations that simply prevent a modern gaming experience.
And yet, I’m having a blast with Oblivion Remastered. The problem with Starfield is that the writing sucks and the game loops aren’t fun. Because of these things it’s an unforgivable bore. Oblivion proves you’ll trudge back and forth and deal with all the copied and pasted caves in the world if the story is engaging and the gameplay loop is fun. The dated engine has little to do with Starfield’s problems.
The graphics aren’t the problem. The Creation Engine is not just graphics, it handles everything about how the game works. How the AI works and responds to events, how NPCs handle tasks even when not actively interacting with the player, etc. Graphics is only one part of a game, and that’s not the source of the issues.
Oblivion Remastered still uses the Gamebryo engine from Oblivion for everything with one exception, Unreal now handles the graphics. That’s why the game is nearly identical to the original in every way except graphics, it is.
The other person literally said Oblivion is good despite the engine being 80% gamebryo. Don’t write like AI and ignore context. The stuff that is really bad in Starfield is the design philosophy of autogenerated content. This is entirely different from the engine choice.
No it’s exactly the same, you just notice it more because of the different context of a limited fantasy realm versus open stellar exploration.
Oblivion and Skyrim also have a bunch of procedurally generated content. But it is more easily ignored, because these are dungeons and caves and not numerous planets where you are walking for upwards of 15 minutes or more across open terrain to visit the same dozen locations. And having dozens of loading screens to stitch each small segment together.
Starfield as a concept doesn’t work with the engine, because the engine is incapable of adequately creating an open environment at that level. If it could, they would have given it to us instead of Skyrim in space. We got Skyrim in space because that’s the limit of the engine. Bethesda’s insistence of continuing to use it, and claiming that it’s not an issue, despite the clear deficiencies in the released product, is a slap in the face to every player. It’s the definition of “You’ll take what we give you, and like it”.
But really you could make a fantastic game with the engine they had and starfield could have been good if it had great writing and great characters and quests. If people loved it and had some gripes about technical limitations that would be one thing. It’s an okay game with technical limitations, that makes it a bad game.
All of your criticisms are spot on. The only thing is disagree with is the story. I thought it was alright. Some of the side quests were great, but there weren’t a lot of those.
I really enjoyed the ship building, but it was extremely limited and unbalanced.
I will say the loading screens didn’t bother me, though.
The only thing is disagree with is the story. I thought it was alright.
It was barely alright up until the end and you basically do a NewGame+ in the most boring and lazy way possible; go through this gateway to a ‘new dimension’ that’s exactly the same as this one. About the time I saw that I immediately quit and uninstalled. I couldn’t care less if there is a better story after you NG+ it however many more times, I couldn’t stand playing through that game again.
The ship building is convoluted, difficult to establish where the doors/passageways will be.
My beef is with the guns selection. We have several classes of guns but they all get mixed up in the menu.
I thought the story was weak as hell, to say the least.
Have you played No Man’s Sky? That’s how you have a good transition between space and land. Having loading screens when entering a big building doesn’t bother me. But the bugs in having or not doors and being or not in a place without atmosphere, does.
Their overall premises differ a lot, but it’s very easy to see that a lot of the “exploration” in SF tried to copy NMS, but did so in the worst way possible.
Scanning plants and wildlife? Turn on scan mode and find those. Only in Starfield, you have to do it several times to complete, because FUN!
Points of interest dotting the planet surface? Sure! Just make sure they have zero connection to anything in both games!
Space exploration? Just a random dice roll when you enter a planet orbi, clearly better than using an item to search for a random POI in space!
Coming from a long time fan of Bethesda RPGs They have gotten way too comfortable relying on radiant quests and proc gen content. Those aren’t inherently bad, but the way they were implemented in Starfield was. What’s so fun about landing on a planet that appears the same as another a few light years away and seeing the same fucking cryogenics lab with the same layout, items, lore logs, and enemy placement? Chasing the same bounties for a paltry sum of credits (not that you’ll need them it’s easy to break the economy) or legendary loot that you’ll likely just sell (for credits you won’t use)? There are cool things like ship building that could be further fleshed out but so much of the game ended up undercooked and uninspired (space travel with your ship was a glorified screensaver in a game about space traversal for Christ’s sake).
Yes, the second I realized they were actually doing that with literally copy pasted areas and notes and characters it killed the game for me. I can be reasonable for a dungeon having the same layout but not written content and characters. It invalidates the entire experience.
I think if Starfield had come out 10 years ago it would have wowed people and been a classic. But now it just seems dated when you have other games doing RPG better (Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher 3, Baldurs Gate 3) and open world space better (No Mans Sky).
Starfield doesnt do RPG as good as those games, nor does it do open world space as well as No Mans Sky. I’ve heard it described as being as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle, and that doesnt seem far off to me.
I really hope Bethesda have paid attention and dont make the same kind of mistakes with Elder Scrolls VI. Big and empty is not the way to go.
Maybe it would have been better received 10 years ago but I don’t know about being beloved like the elder scrolls or fallout games. 10 years ago was Fallout 4 but even in Skyrim era, it’d be great graphics but without the wonderful whimsy
Starfield is too normal. Bethesda games excel when they take the weirdness of the world seriously. Starfield is too serious conceptually. Elder Scrolls, just the concept of everything being canon because of dragon breaks and other weird aedra/daedra/chim/godhead shenanigans lets writers write wild while it still fitting in as serious in universe
They’ve managed to do that well enough with Fallout even though it’s supposed to be alternate reality world. Still wacky even if not as lore interesting as TES
Starfield is too unimaginative of a sci-fi universe so far. It’s too normal and because of that, they can’t write whacky in a way that people buy into and love. So then they end up judging the game by its systems and mechanics and technical merit way more than they do elder scrolls games or fallout.
Also base/ship building is given too much focus for a single player game. These games aren’t pretty enough to be a single player game that gets beloved for base building like Animal Crossing
Great point. I agree that people would likely forgive all of the technical and environmental shortcomings(loading screens and bland environments) if the game had even a slightly interesting story. Anything worth experiencing at all. Unfortunately it fails all 3 of those fronts.
The places where it excels (1st person gameplay compared to other B* games, ship building, and graphics imo) are not enough to make it a game worth experiencing.
It honestly should have had another 2 years in the oven to make the lore and universe more interesting.
No way Bethesda wastes another 5-8 years on a sequel with the negative reception Starfield received.
It honestly should have had another 2 years in the oven to make the lore and universe more interesting.
I don’t know, I don’t think it would have changed anything. They might have had an interesting quest or two more, but their writing philosophy of not keeping track of anything and working in isolation would not have made a decent, coherent lore in even 10 extra years, just more unconnected shit with extra tonal dissonance.
Just based on Wikipedia, many commercial failure video games have a sequel made much later on, or have their IP used in a remake or reimagining. Psychonauts is the one I remember since I like the sequel.
The original psychonauts was a cult classic though that got great reviews.
Starfield is in the opposite boat, it doesnt seem to have been a commercial failure, but fan sentiment is really low with the starfield franchise to the point that the hype around a sequel would be nowhere near what it was for psychonauts 2… But this is all my assumption, difficult to find/trust empirical data on fan interest.
Silly example- why are there elevators and LOADING SCREENS in New Atlantis - if you have enough jetpack or just abuse TCL, you can walk around the entirety of New Atlantis, without a single loading screen.
But for some reason Bethesda decided it needed some loading screens for no good reason whatsoever.
My Bethesda rant goes something like this: “they think the ideal video game is when you can treat everything like action figures, make anything happen in any combination just to see it happen, bash em together, pull them apart, make them kiss, make them join every team and do every thing, do whatever you want, and then fuck off because it never meant anything”.
Your take makes me mad. Not because you are wrong or anything, but because you are entirely right and I don’t want you to be lol! I wanted this game to be cool so badly.
I bought it on confidence when it released. That was the last time I ever did this. I played 25 very boring hours and uninstalled it. It’s very difficult to figure out how you can fail so spectacularly with such a budget, such a long development time, and such a carte blanche with making a new universe from scratch
God how did they fuck that up? Who thought I’d want to fast travel there? Sure sometimes, but honestly I’d love it if it showed how many minutes to destination and then you started jumping.
You’re in the pilots chair, you see 10 minutes to the other side of the galaxy where your mission is. You hesitate because that’s far, but 2 minutes away is your home base anyway so might as well swing through and drop off some stuff, make sure the pumps and extractors are working. 6 minutes past that is that side quest you’ve been putting off, I guess we can do that too. You hit the jump button, stars whizz past. You go talk with your crew, get caught up on conversations. You jump back in the chair when the 20 second warning goes off. You jump out and arrive, but there is a weird signal on a nearby planet in this system…
Now THAT’s the game i wanted. Altering one mechanic right there completely changes the entire style of the game. I will forever be annoyed that everything in the game is instant fast travel. Sure have a button there to skip if people want to, but personally I prefer to lay back and fully immerse myself
It could have been so good and the game genuinely has some cool environments but for the most part there is just nothing to do. I’ve stumbled on some cool places like the Mantis hideout and stuff but the game is so repetitive and 98% of the planets are devoid of life.
And they wanted it that way. They were like well that’s what it’s really like! Which like yeah great, but that’s terribly boring for a game.
Another game like that was Mass Effect 1, where they had the undiscovered worlds, but even those were more entertaining. They gave you a mako, and each planet had at least one faction with at least some backstory to it so it wasn’t a complete waste. Starfield is like, nothing. I encounter the exact same building structure and camps multiple times on my single playthrough. Absolutely uninspired
Yep! When I saw that Todd said that I was kind of dumbfounded. I get that that’s how space is but like, that shits boring. They really could have had something special but they severely missed the mark.
They changed the recipe. Skyrim, Fallout 3 and 4, Oblivion, and Morrowind all had something in common: handcrafted environments densely packed with points of interest.
Starfield used procedurally generated content. It generates abandoned mines and outposts from a tileset and then drops you in the literal desert between them.
That’s not the only issue it has. They could’ve made procedural generation work, with having a combination of hand crafted and procedural environments. But it doesn’t seem like they have the skill to pull it off.
Issues this game has, and probably one of the major reasons why it’s so dead feeling, is how the world doesn’t react to you.
Tell me, what happens in Skyrim or Oblivion if you walk around town with your sword drawn?
What happens if you start randomly casting spells where the guards can see you?
What if you managed to get a certain artefact, wear a certain kind of armour, or work on upgrading a certain skill tree?
See what I mean? See what’s missing?
The dead, empty, open world tiles only compounds this. And how everything feels even more limiting because of how the game is strictly chopped up with loading screens.
Very true. So long as your shots don’t hit anybody, or your powers affect anybody, you can show them off all the time on the big cities and nobody gives a fuck. Using the whirlwind Sprint shout on Skyrim makes everyone around comment and a guard desperately asking you to stop.
And some of them are duplicates ! I discovered THREE identical locations just roaming about ! the same dungeon layout ! but different loot. Can you believe that shit
Which is just frustrating because there’s some real improvements in mays of their usual systems elsewhere in the game. The I think the persuasion mechanics are a real step up from previous games and I’m amazed the system hasn’t been ported into Skyrim. They got flight mechanics to actually work in the Creation engine. Zero-G and low gravity works great. Gunplay and combat is even more improved over Fallout 4 (though it’s an incremental improvement over the revolutionary leap made with Fallout 4).
Imo, Starfield is mainly lacking in only a few (though critical) things. They need more than 4 fleshed-out companions, and have them for different factions; there’s a couple of NPC’s that I expected to become companions. Since they insistend on having procedurally generated content, they needed to add way more pieces to their tilesets and, more importantly, have an algorithm to stitch things together and have some actual variety. As it is right now, you get the same exact facilities copy-pasted as whole spaces with no variation. And they needed to not force you into the main storyline, or at least pull a Fallout: New Vegas and have multiple paths through the main storyline.
There’s a lot of good bones to be had in Starfield, which just makes the cock-ups more disappointing since they’ll lead to those imprpvements being abandoned
IDK, I still think about how the dufuses added recoil to laser guns in FO4. And the fact that land mines and similar traps change every time a save is loaded is super dumb because it’s just like “OH DID WIDDLE BABY GET BLOWN DA FUQ UP? LET ME FIX IT FOR YOU (Removes the landmines)”.
Lol it’s such a tremendously boring game with dated gameplay. Bless your little heart if you enjoy it, but it’s a bland, middling game at best and flat out bad in many ways.
My main gripe with the universe of starfield is that it works on fallout logic, as in, everyone acts as if telephones and cameras don’t exist, despite being 300 years in our fucking future without any tech loss.
That “don’t you guys have phones?” Blizzard meme is ironically spot on here. They don’t. Communication only happens face to face while out of a ship.
The other thing is how a lot of the game runs on “nobody cares”. Alien ship showing up on orbit? Nobody cares. Another alien ship showing up and attacking you? Nobody saw it, nobody cares. Alien space magic? Nobody cares. Alien space magic being used to wreak havoc in a big city? Not a word on it, instant amnesia after the attack.
It actually makes sense in Fallout since it’s post-apocalyptic. Yes, the apocalypse happened hundreds of years earlier, but most people still live in squalor while only a privileged few have high tech stuff. Starfield, though? The “apocalypse” took like 50 years to happen and everyone escaped Earth. There’s no excuse for widespread telecommunication to not exist.
“Bethesda game in spaaaaaceee” is more than that, you know it, and it was proven when one of the first costume mods on Nexus was the space suit with a force field boob window tyvm.
For sure, ill feed your curiosity. Starfield is expanding to the stars, massive choices on where the story goes based on your responses, the capabilities to befriend or antagonize any enemy whether a human, alien, or these strange pirates. You deal with politics, survival, and attempting to save the galaxy while trying to discover the hidden story. If you call that generic, I feel sorry for you.
Your reading comprehension seems to be overlooking the part where I started with ‘i had high hopes for this game.’ The game is far from generic, there isnt one person in this thread that could draft a better story or even come close to a released game.
Wanna talk generic? Every starwars game, like ever. Every call of duty game, like ever.
Yall are funny. Thanks for reminding me to jump back onto Starfield!
Also this is just an utterly ridiculous way to respond to criticism of a product, no shit an average joe can’t make a multi million dollar triple A game, but that doesn’t mean he can’t dislike it
“characteristic of or relating to a class or group of things; not specific.”
Ship building alone is very specific, there are very little games that let you truly customize the entirety of the layout on your ship. On top of that, the crazy about of realism that goes into that is insane. Everything can affect something else in that. I’m also a huge fan of the procedural planets, like dozens of them, which what super disappointed me was walking for what felt like daaayyyss across a map.
So again, the concept was great, the execution was not.
massive choices on where the story goes based on your responses,
Really? What massive choices do you make? Hunter or emissary? That just changes the last 20 minutes of the game. Before then, you have no major impact on the plot.
the capabilities to befriend or antagonize any enemy whether a human, alien, or these strange pirates
But you don’t. You can’t befriend the pirates, there arent really any strange aliens, and you can’t antagonize most friends.
You deal with politics, survival,
Do you? There’s some minor “deal with this for me” stuff from the factions, but that’s hardly politics.
And survival isn’t an issue in the game at all, even though you can see the scrapped leftovers from it.
attempting to save the galaxy while trying to discover the hidden story.
The “hidden story” is spelled out and telegraphed in the main questline. It’s not a souls like where you piece it together, they literally tell you to your face
Listen mate, agree to disagree. You are getting into all the points as to why it crushed my hopes, as I have said. Each of those aspects was a great concept, as I have overstated, but the concept fell short, my hopes carried the game farther in my mind than the game could go.
Each topic I pointed out was an area of the game that I felt they could have driven more, but they failed to execute. Then it seemed like there was a glimmer of hope as they were pushing for some major fixes like finally adding a vehicle to travel faster on planets, but again, they fell short and here we are going back and forth like school kiddos arguing about if its the coolest game or not.
Its far from it mate, I agree with all of you but you’re all trying to nitpick each aspect rather than reading my very very first post where I said its a great concept, but it crushed my hopes.
Calling something great is an individual perspective. This is all my perspective, this will be my last response in regards to this topic. Do you have a favorite game that you think is a great concept and great execution? Personally, I don’t, unl3ss we go back to gameboy days.
Yeah you can. That’s literally one of the only major choices you can make; destroy them or join them after going undercover and infiltrating their base.
For sure, ill feed your curiosity. Starfield is expanding to the stars, massive choices on where the story goes based on your responses, the capabilities to befriend or antagonize any enemy whether a human, alien, or these strange pirates. You deal with politics, survival, and attempting to save the galaxy while trying to discover the hidden story. If you call that generic, I feel sorry for you.
Yeah except you didnt say ship building. You didnt say anything about game mechanics here, this is all marketing jargon that can be interpreted in different ways. Maybe go with mechanics if you’re trying to paint uniqueness instead of regurgitating the back of the pamphlet.
Sounds like an AI generated blurb and very far from reality, especially as you have almost no choice in anything, exactly zero of them feel meaningful in any way, can’t “antagonize anyone” (yay for essential npcs 😒), aren’t saving the galaxy and the “hidden story” is one of the worst “ITS THE MULTIVERSE LOL” stories I’ve seen.
I don’t have a problem with people who like and enjoy the game, I just don’t understand your reason to say the game is something that it actually is not
The fundamental concept and theme of the game is trash. It literally makes everything you do meaningless, it inevitably leads to you becoming the jaded villain. It would be better if they had an end where you destroyed the universe shifting thing and were locked in one.
When you beat the game and go thru The Unity to a whole ass different dimension and not one single detail is different in any way. That’s what kills the drive to go onward. Because the game was fine. Once.
The whole story is predicated on a multiverse that effectively doesn’t exist. Except on 1 sidequest for Barrett.
Reading your comment, I’ve just learned more about the story that nearly 250 hrs of gameplay got me. So the end is hokey, huh? Big surprise. I hate Sarah.
You want a fan fucking tastic game that you can put 250 hours in and never regret a minute of it?
The Yakuza franchise. Start wirh Yakuza 0. Play them all. You will laugh. You will cry. You will get so irrationally angry at pixels you’ll want to actually murder them. You’ll fall in love. And cry some more. Your heart will break many times. And nothing will ever be the same.
Ever had a game or movie or book leave you in stunned silence? You spend the next week thinking about it? That’s the Yakuza franchise. It’s silly and stupid and hilarious and it’ll tear your damn heart out when you least expect it.
I picked up Yakuza 0 on a whim in 2020 and absolutely loved it. I subsequently played every main game in the series back to back (including Judgment!) and have eagerly gotten the games at launch even though I very rarely buy games at full price. They’re just that good. Even the goofy Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii connected to the main story in surprising ways. <spoiler>spoiler!<spoiler>
My friend, your heartfelt recommendation is appreciated and will be ignored because I’m not into Asian mystique.
For my part, I I recommend that you revisit the DOOM series. Of course you want a modern zdoom egine to play the early ones. Do not overlook Sigil and the other John Romero wads, which are legit extensions to the story. Proceed to DOOM 3 and discover BFG Edition, which includes an entirely new campaign called The Lost Patrol. After that play DOOM 2016. Stop there. There has never been a better video game made since. You can give up gaming now.
I never really understood that. Everyone hyped up skyrim so hard and when i played it it was… Meh? It was all grey and jank that apparently is enjoyable for some people.
I really liked new vegas and when fallout 4 came out, i never watched a trailer or anything, but i was sick on release day, so on that day, i watched the release trailer and thought why not. I was truly shocked how god damn ugly the game was and how shallow and broken it was.
People had high hopes for starfield and i thought i was taking crazy pills. It’s just the same thing again but somehow even worse. I think i just don’t get it.
Hehe. So, I’ve got 243 hours into Starfield. Level 45.
For me, the game is side quests, killing bad guys all over the place, and taking over as many ships as I can.
I’ve completely ignored the main mission. Haven’t really done any crafting other than upgrading weapons. I started a base and forgot where its at.
The companions are all horrid. I hang out with the robot guy. He’s got good guns.
I use Heller’s Cutter, Arc Welder, and Auto-Rivet. Nothing else. Seemed fitting for a miner. And people burn real good.
I mostly don’t use ship storage except for uncommon stuff. I go through the ridiculous torment of tossing all my junk on the ground in a hold of my ship. Silly fun.
I don’t do a lot of space combat. I’ve got a stack of Class C ships whenever I get around to optimizing them. At some point that will be a new piece of the game that I’ll play.
I may never pursue the main mission. Looks kinda dumb. Can’t tell you exactly what I’ve found fun in this game where I’ve opted out of most of the game. But … every now and then I quicksave and just start burning down all the civilians. A lot of em won’t die. But I keep trying. And then I load my save, because I want to be able to land there again.
I may never pursue the main mission. Looks kinda dumb.
It very much is, and the ‘ending’ was enough for me to drop the game and uninstall it same day. I barely made it to the end, and goddamn was it not worth it.
I don’t really want any magic powers or some final culmination. If I’ve used the (100 cells!) on my cutter, you get to meet my welder, and if you’re out of reach, eat some rivets. I’m not playing some bad guy, but almost the entire game for me is bloodshed, up close, and hardcore. Ya fuk the main mission.
Starfield would be fine if there was a way to get from place to place without constant reloads. This is a limitation of the (ancient) engine the game is on, as I understand it.
The thing is, we already have games like No Man’s Sky which do this very well. Starfield may have been better received if it came out 15 years ago, but against modern space games, it just sucks.
That’s ignoring anything else wrong with the game, of course, and there is plenty. But I could get over a lot if it didn’t feel like I was playing a menu instead of flying a spaceship at every change of scenery.
This is a limitation of the (ancient) engine the game is on, as I understand it.
Old engine isn’t always bad. It is if you do like Todd and just slap more and more plugins and technology on top and call it a new engine, instead of fixing underlying issues or rewriting/updating old parts.
Which is why Starfield NPCs walk onto tables and become owls when the camera zooms into conversations, etc: It is the same code that is used in Skyrim and partly Oblivion. And Todd Howard doesn’t want devs doing silly things like fixing twenty year old code, he wants new and bigger.
Freelancer would have been fresher in memory 15 years ago, and that’s one that had seamless intra-system travel. Gameplay in Freelancer even flowed better than NMS for getting from orbit to orbit and having encounters or discoveries along the way. It just didn’t have the on-foot gameplay. I had the same problem with loading screens in Everspace 2. Killed the flow. Whoever tries to do this again is going to have to make sure transitions are minimal.
And that’s what I don’t get about Starfield, conceptually. With this project scope, you’re not competing well with NMS for ship-to-foot or orbit-to-surface transition, you’re not doing better than Freelancer–a 20+ year old game–for all the in-space stuff, and the procgen hamstrings you with all the “Bethesda magic” their worlds are known for. It’s like someone said “let’s do Daggerfall in space” and went rigid top-down design with it, retrofitting whatever they could along the way to make a functional game around the procgen.
I maintain that if they didn’t bother with the space thing, or abstracted it more to a “blip on a screen” type of topdown play like in mass effect, it would be a better game. They could have spent that time on the shooter gameplay loop not being shit.
The problems of Starfield, the ones that prevent it from being great even if only through modding, are engine-level problems. Those can’t be fixed without remaking the entire game from scratch in a new engine, and nobody wants to do that.
Maybe in a couple decades we’ll get Starfield Remastered made in UE9.
Not really an engine problem, but Bethesda not caring to make the setting even remotely believable and making the mechanical parts feel isolated and meaningless is what hurts the game the most.
Exploring and collecting materials almost serves a purpose, as you need them to craft/upgrade armor and weapons, or to create stuff around your base, but you can just buy the stuff you need off vendors, which makes both the exploration and the point of having a base pointless. Crafting is almost something you might care about, but you can buy pretty much anything you need off vendors (heal kits, drugs) or get them as drops. None of the crafting targets the ship or its parts, for whatever reason.
If the game was just Dungeon -> Vendor -> Dungeon loop, it’d be much, much better rated and less hated. The lack of variety is felt very early on anyway, it’s not like cutting the bullshit would make it worse to endure.
Also, considering how nearly everyone using UE besides Epic themselves seem to do a really shitty job, including Bethesda with Oblivion Remaster, I’d expect that SF remaster to be even worse than the original 😆
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¯\(ツ)/¯ non-FOSS software shouldn’t expect volunteers
Fans patching the Bethesda games is as at least as old as Daggerfall, if not earlier. Daggerfall didn’t have Helseth and Barenziah as Dark Elves until fans fixed it. Pickpocketing in Morrowind is broken unless you use the code patch. The Oblivion leveling problem punishes you for playing the game.
Like every guide for every Bethesda game is going to start with download this unofficial patch, and the unofficial patches for the DLC, and this installer. They’ve relied on fans and treated the community like it’s an FOSS community, without realizing that without good product, the volunteers won’t come.
Yes, but that shouldn’t be the norm, or an expectation, of the developer. “Oh, we don’t need to worry about the game, the fans will just mod it and it’ll bring us lots of money!”
The problems with Starfield aren’t so much the bugs as they are fundamental, often dated, design issues. Here’s a sort of Let’s Play from a podcast I follow with one guy who loves trying to bend sandbox simulations to the point of breaking and a gal who writes comedy. Around the 10m mark, you can start to see where this sandbox should have accounted for this kind of play. If you can’t simultaneously do that while making a galaxy with 1000 planets, then you should probably scope down until you can. Starfield is not a terrible game, but Bethesda needs to evolve.
It’s not that it’s outdated, oblivion does this sort of thing. It’s that starfield just isn’t good, and the older titles are better
It can be both. It was impressive when Oblivion had 7 different interlocking systems but none of them were particularly good, but these days, I think we expect at least one or two of them to be significantly better.
Abby and Vinny from Giant Bomb Beastcast
The story is bad, the ship’s weapons selection is terrible, the outposts are almost useless, the temples are ridiculous, the powers are mostly unnecessary and soooo mmmaaannnyyy loading screens….
It’s Skyrim with a coat of lead paint.
It’s been clear for over a decade that the Creation Engine (let’s be honest it’s still Gamebryo) has run its course. It is not a viable option for a modern game anymore. It has architectural limitations that simply prevent a modern gaming experience.
There have been so many Creation Engine apologists since Oblivion trying to justify its continued existence through multiple new Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, always trying to say that it’s fine. Starfield was the chance to prove that the limitations aren’t actually architectural and that it could be used for a modern game. Clearly that’s not the case. Taking just about any other modern open world RPG to directly compare, Starfield feels like crap in comparison. Hell, even the launch version of Cyberpunk felt better than Starfield does now.
And yet, I’m having a blast with Oblivion Remastered. The problem with Starfield is that the writing sucks and the game loops aren’t fun. Because of these things it’s an unforgivable bore. Oblivion proves you’ll trudge back and forth and deal with all the copied and pasted caves in the world if the story is engaging and the gameplay loop is fun. The dated engine has little to do with Starfield’s problems.
The graphics aren’t the problem. The Creation Engine is not just graphics, it handles everything about how the game works. How the AI works and responds to events, how NPCs handle tasks even when not actively interacting with the player, etc. Graphics is only one part of a game, and that’s not the source of the issues.
Oblivion Remastered still uses the Gamebryo engine from Oblivion for everything with one exception, Unreal now handles the graphics. That’s why the game is nearly identical to the original in every way except graphics, it is.
The other person literally said Oblivion is good despite the engine being 80% gamebryo. Don’t write like AI and ignore context. The stuff that is really bad in Starfield is the design philosophy of autogenerated content. This is entirely different from the engine choice.
No it’s exactly the same, you just notice it more because of the different context of a limited fantasy realm versus open stellar exploration.
Oblivion and Skyrim also have a bunch of procedurally generated content. But it is more easily ignored, because these are dungeons and caves and not numerous planets where you are walking for upwards of 15 minutes or more across open terrain to visit the same dozen locations. And having dozens of loading screens to stitch each small segment together.
Starfield as a concept doesn’t work with the engine, because the engine is incapable of adequately creating an open environment at that level. If it could, they would have given it to us instead of Skyrim in space. We got Skyrim in space because that’s the limit of the engine. Bethesda’s insistence of continuing to use it, and claiming that it’s not an issue, despite the clear deficiencies in the released product, is a slap in the face to every player. It’s the definition of “You’ll take what we give you, and like it”.
Which is it? I’m confused.
But really you could make a fantastic game with the engine they had and starfield could have been good if it had great writing and great characters and quests. If people loved it and had some gripes about technical limitations that would be one thing. It’s an okay game with technical limitations, that makes it a bad game.
“Starfield is my dream game.”
-Todd Howard
“The game is perfect, upgrade your ghetto ass computer.” -Todd Howard
All of your criticisms are spot on. The only thing is disagree with is the story. I thought it was alright. Some of the side quests were great, but there weren’t a lot of those.
I really enjoyed the ship building, but it was extremely limited and unbalanced.
I will say the loading screens didn’t bother me, though.
It was barely alright up until the end and you basically do a NewGame+ in the most boring and lazy way possible; go through this gateway to a ‘new dimension’ that’s exactly the same as this one. About the time I saw that I immediately quit and uninstalled. I couldn’t care less if there is a better story after you NG+ it however many more times, I couldn’t stand playing through that game again.
The ship building is convoluted, difficult to establish where the doors/passageways will be. My beef is with the guns selection. We have several classes of guns but they all get mixed up in the menu.
I thought the story was weak as hell, to say the least.
Have you played No Man’s Sky? That’s how you have a good transition between space and land. Having loading screens when entering a big building doesn’t bother me. But the bugs in having or not doors and being or not in a place without atmosphere, does.
I love NMS, and I think it’s a better game than Starfield overall. But they’re extremely different.
Their overall premises differ a lot, but it’s very easy to see that a lot of the “exploration” in SF tried to copy NMS, but did so in the worst way possible.
Scanning plants and wildlife? Turn on scan mode and find those. Only in Starfield, you have to do it several times to complete, because FUN!
Points of interest dotting the planet surface? Sure! Just make sure they have zero connection to anything in both games!
Space exploration? Just a random dice roll when you enter a planet orbi, clearly better than using an item to search for a random POI in space!
I have almost 6500 hours in FO4, I played today.
I have maybe 300 hours in Starfield, can’t be arsed to look. Haven’t touched it in at least a year.
Bethesda knows how to make great games, but they chose not to. I don’t know why.
That’s my take.
Coming from a long time fan of Bethesda RPGs They have gotten way too comfortable relying on radiant quests and proc gen content. Those aren’t inherently bad, but the way they were implemented in Starfield was. What’s so fun about landing on a planet that appears the same as another a few light years away and seeing the same fucking cryogenics lab with the same layout, items, lore logs, and enemy placement? Chasing the same bounties for a paltry sum of credits (not that you’ll need them it’s easy to break the economy) or legendary loot that you’ll likely just sell (for credits you won’t use)? There are cool things like ship building that could be further fleshed out but so much of the game ended up undercooked and uninspired (space travel with your ship was a glorified screensaver in a game about space traversal for Christ’s sake).
Yes, the second I realized they were actually doing that with literally copy pasted areas and notes and characters it killed the game for me. I can be reasonable for a dungeon having the same layout but not written content and characters. It invalidates the entire experience.
I think if Starfield had come out 10 years ago it would have wowed people and been a classic. But now it just seems dated when you have other games doing RPG better (Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher 3, Baldurs Gate 3) and open world space better (No Mans Sky).
Starfield doesnt do RPG as good as those games, nor does it do open world space as well as No Mans Sky. I’ve heard it described as being as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle, and that doesnt seem far off to me.
I really hope Bethesda have paid attention and dont make the same kind of mistakes with Elder Scrolls VI. Big and empty is not the way to go.
Maybe it would have been better received 10 years ago but I don’t know about being beloved like the elder scrolls or fallout games. 10 years ago was Fallout 4 but even in Skyrim era, it’d be great graphics but without the wonderful whimsy
Starfield is too normal. Bethesda games excel when they take the weirdness of the world seriously. Starfield is too serious conceptually. Elder Scrolls, just the concept of everything being canon because of dragon breaks and other weird aedra/daedra/chim/godhead shenanigans lets writers write wild while it still fitting in as serious in universe
They’ve managed to do that well enough with Fallout even though it’s supposed to be alternate reality world. Still wacky even if not as lore interesting as TES
Starfield is too unimaginative of a sci-fi universe so far. It’s too normal and because of that, they can’t write whacky in a way that people buy into and love. So then they end up judging the game by its systems and mechanics and technical merit way more than they do elder scrolls games or fallout.
Also base/ship building is given too much focus for a single player game. These games aren’t pretty enough to be a single player game that gets beloved for base building like Animal Crossing
Great point. I agree that people would likely forgive all of the technical and environmental shortcomings(loading screens and bland environments) if the game had even a slightly interesting story. Anything worth experiencing at all. Unfortunately it fails all 3 of those fronts.
The places where it excels (1st person gameplay compared to other B* games, ship building, and graphics imo) are not enough to make it a game worth experiencing.
It honestly should have had another 2 years in the oven to make the lore and universe more interesting. No way Bethesda wastes another 5-8 years on a sequel with the negative reception Starfield received.
I don’t know, I don’t think it would have changed anything. They might have had an interesting quest or two more, but their writing philosophy of not keeping track of anything and working in isolation would not have made a decent, coherent lore in even 10 extra years, just more unconnected shit with extra tonal dissonance.
I think they will make a Starfield 2 eventually. But most likely in closer to 15-20 years with a fresh set of developers.
Can you think of another commercial failure IP that ever got a sequel? I honestly want to know if this ever happens.
I have to look back and see if Red Dead Revolver was as disappointing as Starfield.
Just based on Wikipedia, many commercial failure video games have a sequel made much later on, or have their IP used in a remake or reimagining. Psychonauts is the one I remember since I like the sequel.
The original psychonauts was a cult classic though that got great reviews.
Starfield is in the opposite boat, it doesnt seem to have been a commercial failure, but fan sentiment is really low with the starfield franchise to the point that the hype around a sequel would be nowhere near what it was for psychonauts 2… But this is all my assumption, difficult to find/trust empirical data on fan interest.
There is just so much potential… squandered.
Silly example- why are there elevators and LOADING SCREENS in New Atlantis - if you have enough jetpack or just abuse TCL, you can walk around the entirety of New Atlantis, without a single loading screen.
But for some reason Bethesda decided it needed some loading screens for no good reason whatsoever.
Damn dude, I’m glad you got so much out of FO4 I did one playthrough when it released and tried to play it again this year, barely got into it.
That’s when Bethesda died for me, didn’t find Skyrims simplifications all that good either but it was still a fun game
Feels like Bethesdas modus operandi is to make a game that appeals to everyone and that’s unfortunately coming at the cost of its established fan base
My Bethesda rant goes something like this: “they think the ideal video game is when you can treat everything like action figures, make anything happen in any combination just to see it happen, bash em together, pull them apart, make them kiss, make them join every team and do every thing, do whatever you want, and then fuck off because it never meant anything”.
Your take makes me mad. Not because you are wrong or anything, but because you are entirely right and I don’t want you to be lol! I wanted this game to be cool so badly.
I bought it on confidence when it released. That was the last time I ever did this. I played 25 very boring hours and uninstalled it. It’s very difficult to figure out how you can fail so spectacularly with such a budget, such a long development time, and such a carte blanche with making a new universe from scratch
The thing for me is that it’s a game about a guild of explorers, and the game is all fast travel. The bits you do “explore” were soulless.
Exactly. What made Morrowind’s sauce was discovering all these places on foot
As other people have complained, it’s a space exploration game without the space nor the exploration
God how did they fuck that up? Who thought I’d want to fast travel there? Sure sometimes, but honestly I’d love it if it showed how many minutes to destination and then you started jumping.
You’re in the pilots chair, you see 10 minutes to the other side of the galaxy where your mission is. You hesitate because that’s far, but 2 minutes away is your home base anyway so might as well swing through and drop off some stuff, make sure the pumps and extractors are working. 6 minutes past that is that side quest you’ve been putting off, I guess we can do that too. You hit the jump button, stars whizz past. You go talk with your crew, get caught up on conversations. You jump back in the chair when the 20 second warning goes off. You jump out and arrive, but there is a weird signal on a nearby planet in this system…
Now THAT’s the game i wanted. Altering one mechanic right there completely changes the entire style of the game. I will forever be annoyed that everything in the game is instant fast travel. Sure have a button there to skip if people want to, but personally I prefer to lay back and fully immerse myself
It could have been so good and the game genuinely has some cool environments but for the most part there is just nothing to do. I’ve stumbled on some cool places like the Mantis hideout and stuff but the game is so repetitive and 98% of the planets are devoid of life.
And they wanted it that way. They were like well that’s what it’s really like! Which like yeah great, but that’s terribly boring for a game.
Another game like that was Mass Effect 1, where they had the undiscovered worlds, but even those were more entertaining. They gave you a mako, and each planet had at least one faction with at least some backstory to it so it wasn’t a complete waste. Starfield is like, nothing. I encounter the exact same building structure and camps multiple times on my single playthrough. Absolutely uninspired
Yep! When I saw that Todd said that I was kind of dumbfounded. I get that that’s how space is but like, that shits boring. They really could have had something special but they severely missed the mark.
They changed the recipe. Skyrim, Fallout 3 and 4, Oblivion, and Morrowind all had something in common: handcrafted environments densely packed with points of interest.
Starfield used procedurally generated content. It generates abandoned mines and outposts from a tileset and then drops you in the literal desert between them.
That’s not the only issue it has. They could’ve made procedural generation work, with having a combination of hand crafted and procedural environments. But it doesn’t seem like they have the skill to pull it off.
Issues this game has, and probably one of the major reasons why it’s so dead feeling, is how the world doesn’t react to you.
Tell me, what happens in Skyrim or Oblivion if you walk around town with your sword drawn?
What happens if you start randomly casting spells where the guards can see you?
What if you managed to get a certain artefact, wear a certain kind of armour, or work on upgrading a certain skill tree?
See what I mean? See what’s missing?
The dead, empty, open world tiles only compounds this. And how everything feels even more limiting because of how the game is strictly chopped up with loading screens.
Very true. So long as your shots don’t hit anybody, or your powers affect anybody, you can show them off all the time on the big cities and nobody gives a fuck. Using the whirlwind Sprint shout on Skyrim makes everyone around comment and a guard desperately asking you to stop.
And some of them are duplicates ! I discovered THREE identical locations just roaming about ! the same dungeon layout ! but different loot. Can you believe that shit
And still Star Flight did the same thing and was a all time great game, oh and it fit on two 360k floppies.
Which is just frustrating because there’s some real improvements in mays of their usual systems elsewhere in the game. The I think the persuasion mechanics are a real step up from previous games and I’m amazed the system hasn’t been ported into Skyrim. They got flight mechanics to actually work in the Creation engine. Zero-G and low gravity works great. Gunplay and combat is even more improved over Fallout 4 (though it’s an incremental improvement over the revolutionary leap made with Fallout 4).
Imo, Starfield is mainly lacking in only a few (though critical) things. They need more than 4 fleshed-out companions, and have them for different factions; there’s a couple of NPC’s that I expected to become companions. Since they insistend on having procedurally generated content, they needed to add way more pieces to their tilesets and, more importantly, have an algorithm to stitch things together and have some actual variety. As it is right now, you get the same exact facilities copy-pasted as whole spaces with no variation. And they needed to not force you into the main storyline, or at least pull a Fallout: New Vegas and have multiple paths through the main storyline.
There’s a lot of good bones to be had in Starfield, which just makes the cock-ups more disappointing since they’ll lead to those imprpvements being abandoned
IDK, I still think about how the dufuses added recoil to laser guns in FO4. And the fact that land mines and similar traps change every time a save is loaded is super dumb because it’s just like “OH DID WIDDLE BABY GET BLOWN DA FUQ UP? LET ME FIX IT FOR YOU (Removes the landmines)”.
I enjoyed the combat in FO3 more.
Lol it’s such a tremendously boring game with dated gameplay. Bless your little heart if you enjoy it, but it’s a bland, middling game at best and flat out bad in many ways.
I hope they do a proper sequel that doesn’t suck. Skyrim in space would be cool if they actually deliver that.
My main gripe with the universe of starfield is that it works on fallout logic, as in, everyone acts as if telephones and cameras don’t exist, despite being 300 years in our fucking future without any tech loss.
That “don’t you guys have phones?” Blizzard meme is ironically spot on here. They don’t. Communication only happens face to face while out of a ship.
The other thing is how a lot of the game runs on “nobody cares”. Alien ship showing up on orbit? Nobody cares. Another alien ship showing up and attacking you? Nobody saw it, nobody cares. Alien space magic? Nobody cares. Alien space magic being used to wreak havoc in a big city? Not a word on it, instant amnesia after the attack.
It actually makes sense in Fallout since it’s post-apocalyptic. Yes, the apocalypse happened hundreds of years earlier, but most people still live in squalor while only a privileged few have high tech stuff. Starfield, though? The “apocalypse” took like 50 years to happen and everyone escaped Earth. There’s no excuse for widespread telecommunication to not exist.
I had super high hopes for this game. I hope its not abandoned completely and we can retry for a starfield 2 in the future. It has a great concept.
🤨
The concept is literally “generic sci-fi RPG.”
“Bethesda game in spaaaaaceee” is more than that, you know it, and it was proven when one of the first costume mods on Nexus was the space suit with a force field boob window tyvm.
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What would you say the concept is?
A just curious
For sure, ill feed your curiosity. Starfield is expanding to the stars, massive choices on where the story goes based on your responses, the capabilities to befriend or antagonize any enemy whether a human, alien, or these strange pirates. You deal with politics, survival, and attempting to save the galaxy while trying to discover the hidden story. If you call that generic, I feel sorry for you.
Yeah that sounds like a generic space rpg setting, you just described the genre. Nothing in that statement can be exclusively tied to starfield
Your reading comprehension seems to be overlooking the part where I started with ‘i had high hopes for this game.’ The game is far from generic, there isnt one person in this thread that could draft a better story or even come close to a released game.
Wanna talk generic? Every starwars game, like ever. Every call of duty game, like ever.
Yall are funny. Thanks for reminding me to jump back onto Starfield!
Also this is just an utterly ridiculous way to respond to criticism of a product, no shit an average joe can’t make a multi million dollar triple A game, but that doesn’t mean he can’t dislike it
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If you don’t call that generic, I have to wonder how you define the word “generic.”
By the literal definition.
“characteristic of or relating to a class or group of things; not specific.”
Ship building alone is very specific, there are very little games that let you truly customize the entirety of the layout on your ship. On top of that, the crazy about of realism that goes into that is insane. Everything can affect something else in that. I’m also a huge fan of the procedural planets, like dozens of them, which what super disappointed me was walking for what felt like daaayyyss across a map.
So again, the concept was great, the execution was not.
You’re describing mechanics not a concept.
Really? What massive choices do you make? Hunter or emissary? That just changes the last 20 minutes of the game. Before then, you have no major impact on the plot.
But you don’t. You can’t befriend the pirates, there arent really any strange aliens, and you can’t antagonize most friends.
Do you? There’s some minor “deal with this for me” stuff from the factions, but that’s hardly politics.
And survival isn’t an issue in the game at all, even though you can see the scrapped leftovers from it.
The “hidden story” is spelled out and telegraphed in the main questline. It’s not a souls like where you piece it together, they literally tell you to your face
Listen mate, agree to disagree. You are getting into all the points as to why it crushed my hopes, as I have said. Each of those aspects was a great concept, as I have overstated, but the concept fell short, my hopes carried the game farther in my mind than the game could go.
Each topic I pointed out was an area of the game that I felt they could have driven more, but they failed to execute. Then it seemed like there was a glimmer of hope as they were pushing for some major fixes like finally adding a vehicle to travel faster on planets, but again, they fell short and here we are going back and forth like school kiddos arguing about if its the coolest game or not.
Its far from it mate, I agree with all of you but you’re all trying to nitpick each aspect rather than reading my very very first post where I said its a great concept, but it crushed my hopes.
Calling something great is an individual perspective. This is all my perspective, this will be my last response in regards to this topic. Do you have a favorite game that you think is a great concept and great execution? Personally, I don’t, unl3ss we go back to gameboy days.
Cheers mate, hope youre well.
Yeah you can. That’s literally one of the only major choices you can make; destroy them or join them after going undercover and infiltrating their base.
You also just described KOTOR 1 & 2, Elite Dangerous, Eve Online, Endless Skies, and in a way Hellpoint. All Sci-Fi.
LOL kotor is all story line. What ship are you building there?
Elite? Thats a flight sim, not an RPG
Eve? Show me first person on there.
Endless skies? Do you mean endless sky? Or endless space? Genuinely unfamiliar with that. Guess its too generic.
Hellpoint? The level based game with their small maps?
Yeah except you didnt say ship building. You didnt say anything about game mechanics here, this is all marketing jargon that can be interpreted in different ways. Maybe go with mechanics if you’re trying to paint uniqueness instead of regurgitating the back of the pamphlet.
Sounds like an AI generated blurb and very far from reality, especially as you have almost no choice in anything, exactly zero of them feel meaningful in any way, can’t “antagonize anyone” (yay for essential npcs 😒), aren’t saving the galaxy and the “hidden story” is one of the worst “ITS THE MULTIVERSE LOL” stories I’ve seen.
Can we just hug this out?
I like the game, some hate it, im disappointed in it, but I dont wanna keep fighting online about it. I’d rather hug it out.
I don’t have a problem with people who like and enjoy the game, I just don’t understand your reason to say the game is something that it actually is not
The fundamental concept and theme of the game is trash. It literally makes everything you do meaningless, it inevitably leads to you becoming the jaded villain. It would be better if they had an end where you destroyed the universe shifting thing and were locked in one.
The base game is fine. Once. Its just fine. Once.
When you beat the game and go thru The Unity to a whole ass different dimension and not one single detail is different in any way. That’s what kills the drive to go onward. Because the game was fine. Once.
The whole story is predicated on a multiverse that effectively doesn’t exist. Except on 1 sidequest for Barrett.
Reading your comment, I’ve just learned more about the story that nearly 250 hrs of gameplay got me. So the end is hokey, huh? Big surprise. I hate Sarah.
You want a fan fucking tastic game that you can put 250 hours in and never regret a minute of it?
The Yakuza franchise. Start wirh Yakuza 0. Play them all. You will laugh. You will cry. You will get so irrationally angry at pixels you’ll want to actually murder them. You’ll fall in love. And cry some more. Your heart will break many times. And nothing will ever be the same.
Ever had a game or movie or book leave you in stunned silence? You spend the next week thinking about it? That’s the Yakuza franchise. It’s silly and stupid and hilarious and it’ll tear your damn heart out when you least expect it.
I picked up Yakuza 0 on a whim in 2020 and absolutely loved it. I subsequently played every main game in the series back to back (including Judgment!) and have eagerly gotten the games at launch even though I very rarely buy games at full price. They’re just that good. Even the goofy Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii connected to the main story in surprising ways. <spoiler>spoiler!<spoiler>
My friend, your heartfelt recommendation is appreciated and will be ignored because I’m not into Asian mystique.
For my part, I I recommend that you revisit the DOOM series. Of course you want a modern zdoom egine to play the early ones. Do not overlook Sigil and the other John Romero wads, which are legit extensions to the story. Proceed to DOOM 3 and discover BFG Edition, which includes an entirely new campaign called The Lost Patrol. After that play DOOM 2016. Stop there. There has never been a better video game made since. You can give up gaming now.
If the base game has to be made better with mods then you’ve failed as a game designer.
i don’t even know how you could meaningfully mod Starfield. the game is rotten to the core, you would be better off making your own space rpg
Bethesda is such a garbage company. No idea why people buy these half assed games
I never really understood that. Everyone hyped up skyrim so hard and when i played it it was… Meh? It was all grey and jank that apparently is enjoyable for some people.
I really liked new vegas and when fallout 4 came out, i never watched a trailer or anything, but i was sick on release day, so on that day, i watched the release trailer and thought why not. I was truly shocked how god damn ugly the game was and how shallow and broken it was.
People had high hopes for starfield and i thought i was taking crazy pills. It’s just the same thing again but somehow even worse. I think i just don’t get it.
Because we all loved morrowind…
I certainly did. That good will got me buying their games up through Fallout 4 which finally crushed it. Didn’t even look at Starfield.
I bought it on pre-release on steam and refunded it right before go live.
Love how try before you buy works now. Charge me for early access to play a couple days early? Well shucks… guess I get a free trial period.
By the end of the weekend I was disillusioned. No meaningful exploration in a space game is insane.
Hehe. So, I’ve got 243 hours into Starfield. Level 45.
For me, the game is side quests, killing bad guys all over the place, and taking over as many ships as I can.
I’ve completely ignored the main mission. Haven’t really done any crafting other than upgrading weapons. I started a base and forgot where its at.
The companions are all horrid. I hang out with the robot guy. He’s got good guns.
I use Heller’s Cutter, Arc Welder, and Auto-Rivet. Nothing else. Seemed fitting for a miner. And people burn real good.
I mostly don’t use ship storage except for uncommon stuff. I go through the ridiculous torment of tossing all my junk on the ground in a hold of my ship. Silly fun.
I don’t do a lot of space combat. I’ve got a stack of Class C ships whenever I get around to optimizing them. At some point that will be a new piece of the game that I’ll play.
I may never pursue the main mission. Looks kinda dumb. Can’t tell you exactly what I’ve found fun in this game where I’ve opted out of most of the game. But … every now and then I quicksave and just start burning down all the civilians. A lot of em won’t die. But I keep trying. And then I load my save, because I want to be able to land there again.
It very much is, and the ‘ending’ was enough for me to drop the game and uninstall it same day. I barely made it to the end, and goddamn was it not worth it.
I don’t really want any magic powers or some final culmination. If I’ve used the (100 cells!) on my cutter, you get to meet my welder, and if you’re out of reach, eat some rivets. I’m not playing some bad guy, but almost the entire game for me is bloodshed, up close, and hardcore. Ya fuk the main mission.
Starfield would be fine if there was a way to get from place to place without constant reloads. This is a limitation of the (ancient) engine the game is on, as I understand it.
The thing is, we already have games like No Man’s Sky which do this very well. Starfield may have been better received if it came out 15 years ago, but against modern space games, it just sucks.
That’s ignoring anything else wrong with the game, of course, and there is plenty. But I could get over a lot if it didn’t feel like I was playing a menu instead of flying a spaceship at every change of scenery.
Old engine isn’t always bad. It is if you do like Todd and just slap more and more plugins and technology on top and call it a new engine, instead of fixing underlying issues or rewriting/updating old parts.
Which is why Starfield NPCs walk onto tables and become owls when the camera zooms into conversations, etc: It is the same code that is used in Skyrim and partly Oblivion. And Todd Howard doesn’t want devs doing silly things like fixing twenty year old code, he wants new and bigger.
Freelancer would have been fresher in memory 15 years ago, and that’s one that had seamless intra-system travel. Gameplay in Freelancer even flowed better than NMS for getting from orbit to orbit and having encounters or discoveries along the way. It just didn’t have the on-foot gameplay. I had the same problem with loading screens in Everspace 2. Killed the flow. Whoever tries to do this again is going to have to make sure transitions are minimal.
And that’s what I don’t get about Starfield, conceptually. With this project scope, you’re not competing well with NMS for ship-to-foot or orbit-to-surface transition, you’re not doing better than Freelancer–a 20+ year old game–for all the in-space stuff, and the procgen hamstrings you with all the “Bethesda magic” their worlds are known for. It’s like someone said “let’s do Daggerfall in space” and went rigid top-down design with it, retrofitting whatever they could along the way to make a functional game around the procgen.
I maintain that if they didn’t bother with the space thing, or abstracted it more to a “blip on a screen” type of topdown play like in mass effect, it would be a better game. They could have spent that time on the shooter gameplay loop not being shit.
I stopped playing mid-loading screen. My awareness just snapped into place, and I realized that the last 30 minutes of “gameplay” was effectively:
The problems of Starfield, the ones that prevent it from being great even if only through modding, are engine-level problems. Those can’t be fixed without remaking the entire game from scratch in a new engine, and nobody wants to do that.
Maybe in a couple decades we’ll get Starfield Remastered made in UE9.
Not really an engine problem, but Bethesda not caring to make the setting even remotely believable and making the mechanical parts feel isolated and meaningless is what hurts the game the most.
Exploring and collecting materials almost serves a purpose, as you need them to craft/upgrade armor and weapons, or to create stuff around your base, but you can just buy the stuff you need off vendors, which makes both the exploration and the point of having a base pointless. Crafting is almost something you might care about, but you can buy pretty much anything you need off vendors (heal kits, drugs) or get them as drops. None of the crafting targets the ship or its parts, for whatever reason.
If the game was just Dungeon -> Vendor -> Dungeon loop, it’d be much, much better rated and less hated. The lack of variety is felt very early on anyway, it’s not like cutting the bullshit would make it worse to endure.
Also, considering how nearly everyone using UE besides Epic themselves seem to do a really shitty job, including Bethesda with Oblivion Remaster, I’d expect that SF remaster to be even worse than the original 😆