It has it’s share of problems, but for the most part I’m enjoying it greatly.
The biggest issue (for me) is that outposts are largely useless and can safely be ignored. Exploration is useless and can safely be ignored. They both need to be fleshed out and made much more important to the game as a whole.
I feel like I need to do outposts and scan planets to experience the game fully, but I don’t want to do either of those things because they’re pointless.
However on the flip side of that, a LOT of the quest lines are super fun and some of the best I’ve seen in a Bethesda game for sure. The whole Crimson Fleet storyline was great, for example, although I wish there were more options to subvert it. (I found myself wanting to drop certain evidence off with the news reporter rather than where I was supposed to. I was sad when it didn’t let me.)
Ship building is great, but companions are clingy and needy.
The biggest positive is that we simply have a proper single-player game again instead of the pseudo-single-player crap from ubisoft where for certain missions you need to “team up” with other people online who may or may not be annoying as fuck.
So all in all, swings and roundabouts. But for me, the positives more than outweigh the negatives.
Every time I go play it I barely make it an hour before I get incredibly bored. I think the Bethesda formula really didn’t translate well to the bland space theme and has just run its course in general, at least for me. The nagging issues like endless loading screens, forced fast travel, miniscule carry weight, annoying UI, and lack of basic settings don’t help either. I know there are mods to fix some of those, but we really shouldn’t have to rely on mods to do something as basic as change the FOV in a game published by a billion dollar company.
Solid points. I’d of preferred they just made another decent fallout game. I think I tolerate some of their shortcomings in those games better because of nostalgia…
Honestly, I was surprised to hear that the game forces fast travel. I mean, a small indie company like Hello Games managed to make a procedurally generated universe where you can hop in your ship, fly off the planet, and either cruise through the galaxy or turn on warp speed and leave it all behind. Hell, you can even do it all in VR.
Yet, somehow, Bethesda made a space exploration game that doesn’t really let you explore space.
Of course, this is only what I’ve heard about it. I’ve been way too busy playing Baldur’s Gate 3 to play anything else. But my hype for eventually playing Starfield has dwindled to a solid “meh”. Maybe I’ll play it sometime when I don’t have anything better to do.
I got it for “free” with my new cpu purchase. I played about 5 hours. It was a total slog. Put it down and have zero regrets. Bethesda has been making some very boring games lately imo.
Skyrim was one of my favorite games for several years.
I tried watching my husband play Starfield but I kept zoning out, using my phone, or getting up to do something else. I’d rather do laundry. Starfield is boring A.F to watch, and I have zero interest in playing it
Fair point on Skyrim being more fun to play than to watch. I agree. And if you like Starfield as it is- then so be it! I’m not trying to shit on anyone’s enjoyment of the game
BUT…my husband likes to try to optimize everything. So we’ll spend time looking at different aspects- some of the graphics just infuriated me. Some things looked so amazing, but others… meh or… wtf. The facial expressions are way behind the times, and everything he showed me seemed lacking in one way or another. Like that Aurora nightclub. The NPC’s are talking about what an amazing experience they are having, meanwhile it’s like 15 of them badly dancing or just standing around. They certainly didn’t look like they were having fun and they moved around like a group of homeless methheads
He ended up playing some more of the game once I went to bed, and then conceeded that it’s lack-luster and moved on to something else
Yeah, I got about 150 hours in, did all the side quests I could find, went through NG+ did almost all the things needed to ng+ again but now I’m just like… Meh why?
I’m sure it’ll be a great game for modders, there’s already a good bit that help with some of the basics (UI, beth wtf) so I got pretty good moneys worth from the game and here’s to hoping I can take many more trips in like FO4 and Skyrim with mods to vastly improve things :)
On the Aurora thing, I mean… You ever been in a club with people on Molly? They look out of their minds so… Doesn’t seem too far off lmao
Bout to start a fresh run on New Vegas, been many many years so I’m excited :D
So far I’ve seen a lot of Bethesda typical bugs, but nothing game breaking yet.
Yes the first few hours of a play through are a slog, after it opens up more it becomes much more enjoyable. A live another life type mod would make me immensely happy.
That being said, Bethesda does a good job of making a platform for modding, and thats the KEY thing that keeps me buying, and playing again and again, Bethesda games.
For that reason ESO just never had the magic to me, I understand a lot of mods found for single player games would be highly unbalanced and its not an option for an MMO. That said, without mods Bethesda games are lackluster and I quickly lost interest despite trying to enjoy it a few times. I like MMOs too, don’t get me wrong, I’m not someone who only plays shooters being introduced to an MMO.
I’m excited to see what the modding community can do once the tools are released in 2024.
It’s been out longer and has improved over time. I’d wait until Starfield has been out for about the same length of time, see if things even out or continue to trend down.
What needs improvement in Starfield, though, isn’t likely to actually be improved. Can’t even think of a time where a game’s story was re-written over time to be better.
I’m not surprised…it’s just okay. I’ve put maybe 25 hours into it and it’s not grabbing me like I hoped it would. Fast traveling everywhere is boring, inventory management is a nightmare, and the UI is frustrating. The last straw for me was during the " Rook Meets Queen" mission >!where I’m supposed to be deep undercover in the Crimson Fleet yet I can’t progress until I pay them 45,000 credits because there’s a bounty on my head. Seriously? Either I’m undercover or I’m not. !< So I put it down to revisit Cyberpunk, and I’m hoping once I get through that the kinks will be ironed out and the mod tools with MO2 support will be ready. I still have more fun playing a heavily modded Skyrim.
What? The developer whose UI has been consistently shite from game to game, only for mods to come to the rescue, has released yet another obnoxious UI? Whose games are pretty much universally “great with mods”, is meh right out the gate?
Colour me shocked!
Funny, that’s the exact mission that made me lose interest in the game as well. >!I hopped on that day for the base building and eventually ship building but I guess I had a stolen item on me and triggered the mission. I don’t want to be forced to do this mission or pay the fine when all I wanted to do was play a different portion of the game that was available to me.!<
It’s just a clunky reskin of fo4 with no depth. I’ve put about 50 hrs in at this point & will probably continue for a bit because it’s a comforting loot cycle that pleases my lizard brain. It really lacks the feeling exploration possibilities that Skyrim & fallout worlds have. The bugs, UI, bland emptiness, and shit tier maps are why I wouldn’t recommend…but is a decent time kill if you’ve enjoyed their previous games
Same, I pirated it to give it a try, put in a few dozen hours to make sure I’m not missing anything but left pretty disappointed tbh. It has a strong interesting opening but the more you try to get into the nitty gritty details, the more shallow and flawed the game becomes until you’re just doing chores for the sake of it. Some people find enjoyment in these chores but it ain’t me, maybe in a few years it becomes better. I got phantom liberty instead and am having a blast there instead
When I say opening / beginning I don’t mean the 20 minutes of prologue, I mean the first ~5 hours of game showing new mechanics and worlds to you, making the illusion that there’s lot of unique fun content to do. Eventually it all started to look like same formulaic shallow crap to me and the game didn’t live up to that initial impression of freedom, exploration and progression, it’s half baked in everything.
The game didn’t open up for me until about 8-10 hours in and felt really weird and restricted during that time. No idea what impression of freedom, exploration and progression you’re talking about here because the beginning does not give you anything like that at all with how it makes you follow the very boring main quest.
Same happened to me, I pirated it to try it out and after an hour or two I got bored and called it quits. I returned to it once more but after maybe 5 hours I just uninstalled it.
Actually, a surprising number of areas with doors or fast travel between them don’t need it. The entirety of New Atlantis’s exterior is a single cell. Same with Neon
New Vegas uses Bethesda’s Fallout 3 engine, but it was made by Obsidian. It’s not the most representative of what Bethesda does (well, except the part where it’s very buggy, I guess. That part mostly comes with the engine).
Honestly, I’m amazed by the hatedom for Starfield. It’s … a Bethesda game (and it’s actually better at being a Bethesda game than Fo4). I’m not sure what people seem to have expected?
I don’t think it’s a bad game at all. But the Bethesda formula is definitely showing its age and the muted tone and presentation of Starfield, compared to Elder Scrolls and Fallout, accentuates this. I have like a dozen other games vying for my attention and a huge backlog of other titles, and I’ve been struggling to find motivation to play Starfield as a result. If I’d paid CDN$90 for the privilege I’d probably feel more strongly about it either way.
Their biggest, most consistent fault isn’t bugs orjank, it’s the stale as fuck writing. They desperately need the hand the reigns to some new talent in that area.
It feels like they’ve been incapable of writing a compelling narrative with interesting characters for decades now.
Skyrim had some very compelling narratives, however it has the prior games lore buildup to build off of
I feel like Starfield is a lot more “matter of fact” about it, wherein things are told to you moreso rather then needing to go out and “find” the lore.
I also don’t know of any mysteries in the Starfield world that aren’t just… Explainable
For example, terrormorphs or starborn, the game just tells you the details with hardly any effort needed to uncover the info yourself.
Maybe I’m just way to into the FromSoft narrative style at this point where there’s tons of deep lore but they don’t just hand it to you on a platter, makes it more fun to theorize and dig
My hot take on Bethesda is, they simply don’t do game design. They take their previous game, slap whatever is the fashionable mechanic of the day on top, and just roll with the punches until it sorta kinda works.
They haven’t done any real game design probably since Morrowind. Since then they’ve added weapon armor crafting in skyrim, base building and weapon customization in fallout 4, and now in starfield they’re adding procedural planets, resource mining, Ship building… the game is collapsing under sheer feature count.
The problem for me is, it’s not enhancing the core Bethesda experience; they are rather diluting it. All this extra crap just distracts from the actual thing I want from a Bethesda game, which is a big open designed world filled with interesting locations, characters and quests that you’re free to discover as you like. The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.
The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.
Agreed; I don’t even understand why procedural generation is popular anymore. It was novel in its first uses, but where devs see convenient shortcuts and marketers see “infinite replayability,” I see “this shit is all going to feel identical after like 5 tries tops.”
Oh look, it’s the skybox from 3 planets ago with the ruin from 2 planets ago and the enemy selection from 5 planets ago. And I think this might be a new shade of blue in the grass, or is that just the skybox casting a weird hue over everything?
More progress than “better at being a Bethesda game than Fo4”.
I was a die hard Bethesda fan prior to 76 and they need to do better than par to earn my favor back. They scorned me and my wallet isn’t going to forget that any time soon.
Nothing. I didn’t buy it nor review bomb it. I watched the gameplay and scoffed at how yet again we were being spoon fed more mediocre Bethesda content.
The thing is, I want to love them. I used to be obsessed with the lore from Fallout and I’m embarrassed to admit how much time I spent playing ESO. It sucks but if I keep giving them my money I’m just basically saying “it’s okay you screwed me over”. If they really want my money again they have to shape up both their buggy software and their business practices.
Yup, I’m right there with you. For me it started with their paid modding nonsense with Valve. They apologized, I forgave them, and then they literally did it again with the Creation Club. Totally betrayed our trust and clearly only did it because they were so desperate to monetize their modding scene in any capacity that they were fine with going back on their word.
Fallout 76, along with the preorder BS, the atomic shop, and their overpriced subscription service, all added to my growing distrust in Bethesda. And tbh even Fallout 4 really let me down and made me nervous about future games.
All that being said, I still really wanted to like Starfield. Unfortunately I just didn’t.
It doesn’t have the same impact from the world design or story telling. It’s generic. It’s boring. It’s bland. The game play is exactly the same, but the motivation to give a shit about anything is gone because nothing about the world is very interesting aside from the aesthetics.
Shit, man, even the books in the game are just excerpts from real books. Like… humans haven’t written anything new in the 200 something years since Earth’s exodus? Cmon.
I believe it amplifies some of the worst aspects of their games. If I think back to what I liked about Oblivion, it was a world that felt lived in. Objects had purpose, characters had homes, content was discovered. It relied a lot on procedural content, but it felt like there was a strong level of cohesion between the procedural elements and mechanics. The disparate aspects of the game fed into one another. With Starfield, you get this huge increase in scope, but each individual part feels kind of empty and boring and clunky and slow.
Here’s a contrasting example:
In Oblivion, imagine if you wanted to steal something from a vendor. You have to wait for night, you have to pick the lock, items have actual value, you have to stealth in case they catch you, you know if they can see you, there are other things to do in the city in the meantime, and during all this you might find something unexpected along the way that completely tangents you off into a different direction. All these elements come together to create interesting player stories, and none if it needs to be tied to any guided narrative.
In Starfield, all of these elements fall apart. The scope of the game means you’re constantly fast travelling from location to location. No single location has too much going on, and half the time what is there is sending you back out to space anyway, so you never really feel much connection to any physical place. The relative value of items is totally skewed because of the scale of ship related expenses compared to anything else, so what’s the value of stealing a cool rock? It’s also very difficult to tell relative weapon/item quality at a glance. I know that a steel sword is better than an iron sword; I have no clue why a Reflective Terrablazer is better than a Targeted Blurgun - and the default weapons usually don’t matter anyway because I would much rather have cool modifiers. The stealth and lockpick mechanics are both behind skill tree unlocks, so you’re far less likely to engage with those mechanics in the first place. The shops are all open 24/7 (I think? honestly don’t even know) so the day/night cycle seems irrelevant, so sneaking in to the shop is a no go, and I feel pretty limited in lockpicks and don’t really know where to reliably buy than a few at a time. And you never, ever, find anything surprising or compelling, and if you did it would be reduced to a quest checkbox.
So to summarize: I don’t know who I’m stealing from, I don’t know why I would care to steal anything, it’s not obvious how stealthy anyway I am unless I skill into it, it’s not worth using my lockpicks, I’ll never be caught, and their door is always open. There’s zero motivation to actually engage with the world in a way that makes it feel alive. But it’s critical to note: all those systems are still there! You can do all this stuff in the game! But because of how things are structured, even though the game on a fundamental level is extremely similar, the way you interact with it is totally removed from the kind of emergent fun that makes exploring those worlds so fun. It’s just a smooth path of monotony to the next thing. The systems often amount to less than the sum of their parts.
Now I’ll admit, some of this could be on me. Maybe I’ve changed. It’s possible. But man, I tried. Hey, what’s that cool cave on this planet? I’ll go check it out! Oh uhh, it’s nothing? There’s… a dead crab and a box with some old glue? Okay I guess?
I think vendors being open 24/7 was a quality of life choice. Different planets work on different time-scales. In skyrim, you fast travel from Riverwood to Whiterun, and it only takes a few in-game hours. You leave Riverwood at day and likely load into Whiterun at day as well, so shops and quest-givers are more likely to be up and open.
In Starfield, the day/night cycle and the distances are so different and vast that every time you jumped anywhere it would be a 50/50 on it being night and you having to find a bed or chair to wait or not. I think that would get tedious, so the shoddy solution is that everything is open 24/7.
Oh you’re definitely correct. But I think many decisions were made in this way, and it compromises the core experience. There’s all these friction points between the different systems that make the experience feel disjointed. They are each fine in isolation, but they don’t talk to each other very well, in my opinion.
Even Skyrim arguably suffered a little from problem of locations not mattering, but at least you needed to first visit the place to unlock it as a fast travel point, which meant you needed to travel there on foot, which meant exploring the world, which requires other design work that supports that experience. But for Starfield of course, these are planets so you can just fly there. It makes sense for what the game is, but it doesn’t make for a compelling experience. See that mountain? You can go to your map and fast travel there.*
*I know it doesn’t work that way once you land on a planet, but you know what I mean
I did actually enjoy starfield (it wasn’t amazing or anything, but I don’t regret my purchase), but I have to say, I hate this argument.
For one thing, being a Bethesda game doesn’t just immediately grant a pass for being bad in all the ways Bethesda games are generally always bad (bugs, bad facial animations, outdated mechanics, etc). Each game should be judged for how good of a game it is, not how good a " Bethesda game" it is.
Secondly, and more importantly, the fact is that this time around is especially bad simply because all the typical “Bethesda” issues are just starting to become more and more egregious as time goes on. The fact is that if you handed me this game and told me that it was a heavily modded copy of FO4 I’d 100% believe you. Nothing in this game really shows a meaningful step forward either in tech or gameplay from what we’ve seen before. The only real “new” thing is ship to ship combat, which is frankly very lackluster.
As for what people expected? Better. That’s pretty much the long and the short of it. They expected it to feel less clunky than FO4, they expected space travel mechanics that weren’t just glorified fast travel menus, and new gameplay that doesn’t just feel like the same shit Bethesda has been doing since Morrowind.
That being said, the worldbuilding is phenomenal, as is typical of Bethesda, and at least for me, that’s where most of the fun came in, just wandering around and doing side quests to explore more of the world. But once you’ve more or less explored the world, there’s not much left to draw you in. The gameplay itself certainly hasn’t been fun enough to make me seriously consider a newgame+ any time soon.
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I think I’m one of the few people that actually really enjoyed it
“enjoyed” past tense? I feel like that’s part of the problem. No replayability.
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Thr devs certainly think there’s replayablity since they try to force it on you.
Skyrim took a while, and a lot of mods to get there. That’s not really a selling point/positive for a full price AAA game though IMO.
I’ve dropped it and will not go back unless I have no other chores to do.
Happy to let you do mine while I continue enjoying the game.
It has it’s share of problems, but for the most part I’m enjoying it greatly.
The biggest issue (for me) is that outposts are largely useless and can safely be ignored. Exploration is useless and can safely be ignored. They both need to be fleshed out and made much more important to the game as a whole.
I feel like I need to do outposts and scan planets to experience the game fully, but I don’t want to do either of those things because they’re pointless.
However on the flip side of that, a LOT of the quest lines are super fun and some of the best I’ve seen in a Bethesda game for sure. The whole Crimson Fleet storyline was great, for example, although I wish there were more options to subvert it. (I found myself wanting to drop certain evidence off with the news reporter rather than where I was supposed to. I was sad when it didn’t let me.)
Ship building is great, but companions are clingy and needy.
The biggest positive is that we simply have a proper single-player game again instead of the pseudo-single-player crap from ubisoft where for certain missions you need to “team up” with other people online who may or may not be annoying as fuck.
So all in all, swings and roundabouts. But for me, the positives more than outweigh the negatives.
It’s OK, it’s definitely less polished than other Bethesda games and given they’re not known for polish it’d saying something.
It gives a ‘rushed out the door for a midnight deadline’ vibe.
Every time I go play it I barely make it an hour before I get incredibly bored. I think the Bethesda formula really didn’t translate well to the bland space theme and has just run its course in general, at least for me. The nagging issues like endless loading screens, forced fast travel, miniscule carry weight, annoying UI, and lack of basic settings don’t help either. I know there are mods to fix some of those, but we really shouldn’t have to rely on mods to do something as basic as change the FOV in a game published by a billion dollar company.
Solid points. I’d of preferred they just made another decent fallout game. I think I tolerate some of their shortcomings in those games better because of nostalgia…
Honestly, I was surprised to hear that the game forces fast travel. I mean, a small indie company like Hello Games managed to make a procedurally generated universe where you can hop in your ship, fly off the planet, and either cruise through the galaxy or turn on warp speed and leave it all behind. Hell, you can even do it all in VR.
Yet, somehow, Bethesda made a space exploration game that doesn’t really let you explore space.
Of course, this is only what I’ve heard about it. I’ve been way too busy playing Baldur’s Gate 3 to play anything else. But my hype for eventually playing Starfield has dwindled to a solid “meh”. Maybe I’ll play it sometime when I don’t have anything better to do.
I got it for “free” with my new cpu purchase. I played about 5 hours. It was a total slog. Put it down and have zero regrets. Bethesda has been making some very boring games lately imo.
Skyrim was one of my favorite games for several years.
I tried watching my husband play Starfield but I kept zoning out, using my phone, or getting up to do something else. I’d rather do laundry. Starfield is boring A.F to watch, and I have zero interest in playing it
I think Skyrim is also boring to watch, they’re definitely better to play
Fair point on Skyrim being more fun to play than to watch. I agree. And if you like Starfield as it is- then so be it! I’m not trying to shit on anyone’s enjoyment of the game
BUT…my husband likes to try to optimize everything. So we’ll spend time looking at different aspects- some of the graphics just infuriated me. Some things looked so amazing, but others… meh or… wtf. The facial expressions are way behind the times, and everything he showed me seemed lacking in one way or another. Like that Aurora nightclub. The NPC’s are talking about what an amazing experience they are having, meanwhile it’s like 15 of them badly dancing or just standing around. They certainly didn’t look like they were having fun and they moved around like a group of homeless methheads
He ended up playing some more of the game once I went to bed, and then conceeded that it’s lack-luster and moved on to something else
Yeah, I got about 150 hours in, did all the side quests I could find, went through NG+ did almost all the things needed to ng+ again but now I’m just like… Meh why?
I’m sure it’ll be a great game for modders, there’s already a good bit that help with some of the basics (UI, beth wtf) so I got pretty good moneys worth from the game and here’s to hoping I can take many more trips in like FO4 and Skyrim with mods to vastly improve things :)
On the Aurora thing, I mean… You ever been in a club with people on Molly? They look out of their minds so… Doesn’t seem too far off lmao
Bout to start a fresh run on New Vegas, been many many years so I’m excited :D
I bought after it released.
So far I’ve seen a lot of Bethesda typical bugs, but nothing game breaking yet.
Yes the first few hours of a play through are a slog, after it opens up more it becomes much more enjoyable. A live another life type mod would make me immensely happy.
That being said, Bethesda does a good job of making a platform for modding, and thats the KEY thing that keeps me buying, and playing again and again, Bethesda games.
For that reason ESO just never had the magic to me, I understand a lot of mods found for single player games would be highly unbalanced and its not an option for an MMO. That said, without mods Bethesda games are lackluster and I quickly lost interest despite trying to enjoy it a few times. I like MMOs too, don’t get me wrong, I’m not someone who only plays shooters being introduced to an MMO.
I’m excited to see what the modding community can do once the tools are released in 2024.
Same got it free with my 7800x3d, played it for 15 minutes saw it ran like dog shit even on that CPU with a RTX 4090 and said fuck this.
Cyberpunk 2.0 has been incredible though
Fast travel simulator 2023
That is damning considering Fallout 76 is on steam.
It’s been out longer and has improved over time. I’d wait until Starfield has been out for about the same length of time, see if things even out or continue to trend down.
What needs improvement in Starfield, though, isn’t likely to actually be improved. Can’t even think of a time where a game’s story was re-written over time to be better.
Eh it’s pretty standard beth game. It’ll be a great platform for mods to build on.
That’s really all I am looking forward now; the toolkit. So I can make my own quests that don’t suck.
Ff 14 is an example of that
I’m not surprised…it’s just okay. I’ve put maybe 25 hours into it and it’s not grabbing me like I hoped it would. Fast traveling everywhere is boring, inventory management is a nightmare, and the UI is frustrating. The last straw for me was during the " Rook Meets Queen" mission >!where I’m supposed to be deep undercover in the Crimson Fleet yet I can’t progress until I pay them 45,000 credits because there’s a bounty on my head. Seriously? Either I’m undercover or I’m not. !< So I put it down to revisit Cyberpunk, and I’m hoping once I get through that the kinks will be ironed out and the mod tools with MO2 support will be ready. I still have more fun playing a heavily modded Skyrim.
What? The developer whose UI has been consistently shite from game to game, only for mods to come to the rescue, has released yet another obnoxious UI? Whose games are pretty much universally “great with mods”, is meh right out the gate? Colour me shocked!
It’s crazy that every game they release somehow has worse UI than the previous one
Funny, that’s the exact mission that made me lose interest in the game as well. >!I hopped on that day for the base building and eventually ship building but I guess I had a stolen item on me and triggered the mission. I don’t want to be forced to do this mission or pay the fine when all I wanted to do was play a different portion of the game that was available to me.!<
It’s just a clunky reskin of fo4 with no depth. I’ve put about 50 hrs in at this point & will probably continue for a bit because it’s a comforting loot cycle that pleases my lizard brain. It really lacks the feeling exploration possibilities that Skyrim & fallout worlds have. The bugs, UI, bland emptiness, and shit tier maps are why I wouldn’t recommend…but is a decent time kill if you’ve enjoyed their previous games
Same, I pirated it to give it a try, put in a few dozen hours to make sure I’m not missing anything but left pretty disappointed tbh. It has a strong interesting opening but the more you try to get into the nitty gritty details, the more shallow and flawed the game becomes until you’re just doing chores for the sake of it. Some people find enjoyment in these chores but it ain’t me, maybe in a few years it becomes better. I got phantom liberty instead and am having a blast there instead
Wut? The beginning is easily the worst part of the game.
When I say opening / beginning I don’t mean the 20 minutes of prologue, I mean the first ~5 hours of game showing new mechanics and worlds to you, making the illusion that there’s lot of unique fun content to do. Eventually it all started to look like same formulaic shallow crap to me and the game didn’t live up to that initial impression of freedom, exploration and progression, it’s half baked in everything.
The game didn’t open up for me until about 8-10 hours in and felt really weird and restricted during that time. No idea what impression of freedom, exploration and progression you’re talking about here because the beginning does not give you anything like that at all with how it makes you follow the very boring main quest.
Same happened to me, I pirated it to try it out and after an hour or two I got bored and called it quits. I returned to it once more but after maybe 5 hours I just uninstalled it.
Verbatim my opinion. There’s nothing enjoyable here folks unless you like turning off your brain, fast travelling to planets and 100% search missions.
No surprise, if they had only upgraded their game engine so you didn’t have so many cut scenes would have been much better.
By cut scenes you mean loading screens, right? Right!?
Yeah that
Actually, a surprising number of areas with doors or fast travel between them don’t need it. The entirety of New Atlantis’s exterior is a single cell. Same with Neon
So you’re telling me that a game that is an unoptimized, buggy, shallow mess isn’t game of the year? No…
As buggy as Fallout 4 was I absolutely loved it and got me started on the Bethesda Train. Played New Vegas and Skyrim afterwards and those were great.
Starfield almost bored me to tears. Combat and Ship building are great but everything in between is just very average at best.
And then with Cyberpunk releasing it’s 2.0 update and DLC these past week, I have almost no urge to go back to Starfield anytime soon.
New Vegas uses Bethesda’s Fallout 3 engine, but it was made by Obsidian. It’s not the most representative of what Bethesda does (well, except the part where it’s very buggy, I guess. That part mostly comes with the engine).
That’s just Steam. Perhaps it’s being held in higher esteem by the Playstation communi… oh wait.
“Bethesda has garnered a bit of a reputation for releasing games with loads of bugs in them,”
A bit? Lolololol
Honestly, I’m amazed by the hatedom for Starfield. It’s … a Bethesda game (and it’s actually better at being a Bethesda game than Fo4). I’m not sure what people seem to have expected?
I don’t think it’s a bad game at all. But the Bethesda formula is definitely showing its age and the muted tone and presentation of Starfield, compared to Elder Scrolls and Fallout, accentuates this. I have like a dozen other games vying for my attention and a huge backlog of other titles, and I’ve been struggling to find motivation to play Starfield as a result. If I’d paid CDN$90 for the privilege I’d probably feel more strongly about it either way.
Their biggest, most consistent fault isn’t bugs orjank, it’s the stale as fuck writing. They desperately need the hand the reigns to some new talent in that area.
It feels like they’ve been incapable of writing a compelling narrative with interesting characters for decades now.
Skyrim had some very compelling narratives, however it has the prior games lore buildup to build off of
I feel like Starfield is a lot more “matter of fact” about it, wherein things are told to you moreso rather then needing to go out and “find” the lore.
I also don’t know of any mysteries in the Starfield world that aren’t just… Explainable
For example, terrormorphs or starborn, the game just tells you the details with hardly any effort needed to uncover the info yourself.
Maybe I’m just way to into the FromSoft narrative style at this point where there’s tons of deep lore but they don’t just hand it to you on a platter, makes it more fun to theorize and dig
My hot take on Bethesda is, they simply don’t do game design. They take their previous game, slap whatever is the fashionable mechanic of the day on top, and just roll with the punches until it sorta kinda works.
They haven’t done any real game design probably since Morrowind. Since then they’ve added weapon armor crafting in skyrim, base building and weapon customization in fallout 4, and now in starfield they’re adding procedural planets, resource mining, Ship building… the game is collapsing under sheer feature count.
The problem for me is, it’s not enhancing the core Bethesda experience; they are rather diluting it. All this extra crap just distracts from the actual thing I want from a Bethesda game, which is a big open designed world filled with interesting locations, characters and quests that you’re free to discover as you like. The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.
Agreed; I don’t even understand why procedural generation is popular anymore. It was novel in its first uses, but where devs see convenient shortcuts and marketers see “infinite replayability,” I see “this shit is all going to feel identical after like 5 tries tops.”
Oh look, it’s the skybox from 3 planets ago with the ruin from 2 planets ago and the enemy selection from 5 planets ago. And I think this might be a new shade of blue in the grass, or is that just the skybox casting a weird hue over everything?
Much refreshing, very discover, wow.
More progress than “better at being a Bethesda game than Fo4”.
I was a die hard Bethesda fan prior to 76 and they need to do better than par to earn my favor back. They scorned me and my wallet isn’t going to forget that any time soon.
Okay, fair enough, Fo76 was an unmitigated disaster. But what were you expecting from Starfield, exactly?
Nothing. I didn’t buy it nor review bomb it. I watched the gameplay and scoffed at how yet again we were being spoon fed more mediocre Bethesda content.
The thing is, I want to love them. I used to be obsessed with the lore from Fallout and I’m embarrassed to admit how much time I spent playing ESO. It sucks but if I keep giving them my money I’m just basically saying “it’s okay you screwed me over”. If they really want my money again they have to shape up both their buggy software and their business practices.
76 is really good now though, my most played game atm.
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I can at least say the collectors edition of Starfield is pretty cool, I like the watch even if it’s pretty basic and the case is really nifty.
Yup, I’m right there with you. For me it started with their paid modding nonsense with Valve. They apologized, I forgave them, and then they literally did it again with the Creation Club. Totally betrayed our trust and clearly only did it because they were so desperate to monetize their modding scene in any capacity that they were fine with going back on their word.
Fallout 76, along with the preorder BS, the atomic shop, and their overpriced subscription service, all added to my growing distrust in Bethesda. And tbh even Fallout 4 really let me down and made me nervous about future games.
All that being said, I still really wanted to like Starfield. Unfortunately I just didn’t.
It doesn’t have the same impact from the world design or story telling. It’s generic. It’s boring. It’s bland. The game play is exactly the same, but the motivation to give a shit about anything is gone because nothing about the world is very interesting aside from the aesthetics.
Shit, man, even the books in the game are just excerpts from real books. Like… humans haven’t written anything new in the 200 something years since Earth’s exodus? Cmon.
I believe it amplifies some of the worst aspects of their games. If I think back to what I liked about Oblivion, it was a world that felt lived in. Objects had purpose, characters had homes, content was discovered. It relied a lot on procedural content, but it felt like there was a strong level of cohesion between the procedural elements and mechanics. The disparate aspects of the game fed into one another. With Starfield, you get this huge increase in scope, but each individual part feels kind of empty and boring and clunky and slow.
Here’s a contrasting example:
In Oblivion, imagine if you wanted to steal something from a vendor. You have to wait for night, you have to pick the lock, items have actual value, you have to stealth in case they catch you, you know if they can see you, there are other things to do in the city in the meantime, and during all this you might find something unexpected along the way that completely tangents you off into a different direction. All these elements come together to create interesting player stories, and none if it needs to be tied to any guided narrative.
In Starfield, all of these elements fall apart. The scope of the game means you’re constantly fast travelling from location to location. No single location has too much going on, and half the time what is there is sending you back out to space anyway, so you never really feel much connection to any physical place. The relative value of items is totally skewed because of the scale of ship related expenses compared to anything else, so what’s the value of stealing a cool rock? It’s also very difficult to tell relative weapon/item quality at a glance. I know that a steel sword is better than an iron sword; I have no clue why a Reflective Terrablazer is better than a Targeted Blurgun - and the default weapons usually don’t matter anyway because I would much rather have cool modifiers. The stealth and lockpick mechanics are both behind skill tree unlocks, so you’re far less likely to engage with those mechanics in the first place. The shops are all open 24/7 (I think? honestly don’t even know) so the day/night cycle seems irrelevant, so sneaking in to the shop is a no go, and I feel pretty limited in lockpicks and don’t really know where to reliably buy than a few at a time. And you never, ever, find anything surprising or compelling, and if you did it would be reduced to a quest checkbox.
So to summarize: I don’t know who I’m stealing from, I don’t know why I would care to steal anything, it’s not obvious how stealthy anyway I am unless I skill into it, it’s not worth using my lockpicks, I’ll never be caught, and their door is always open. There’s zero motivation to actually engage with the world in a way that makes it feel alive. But it’s critical to note: all those systems are still there! You can do all this stuff in the game! But because of how things are structured, even though the game on a fundamental level is extremely similar, the way you interact with it is totally removed from the kind of emergent fun that makes exploring those worlds so fun. It’s just a smooth path of monotony to the next thing. The systems often amount to less than the sum of their parts.
Now I’ll admit, some of this could be on me. Maybe I’ve changed. It’s possible. But man, I tried. Hey, what’s that cool cave on this planet? I’ll go check it out! Oh uhh, it’s nothing? There’s… a dead crab and a box with some old glue? Okay I guess?
I think vendors being open 24/7 was a quality of life choice. Different planets work on different time-scales. In skyrim, you fast travel from Riverwood to Whiterun, and it only takes a few in-game hours. You leave Riverwood at day and likely load into Whiterun at day as well, so shops and quest-givers are more likely to be up and open.
In Starfield, the day/night cycle and the distances are so different and vast that every time you jumped anywhere it would be a 50/50 on it being night and you having to find a bed or chair to wait or not. I think that would get tedious, so the shoddy solution is that everything is open 24/7.
Oh you’re definitely correct. But I think many decisions were made in this way, and it compromises the core experience. There’s all these friction points between the different systems that make the experience feel disjointed. They are each fine in isolation, but they don’t talk to each other very well, in my opinion.
Even Skyrim arguably suffered a little from problem of locations not mattering, but at least you needed to first visit the place to unlock it as a fast travel point, which meant you needed to travel there on foot, which meant exploring the world, which requires other design work that supports that experience. But for Starfield of course, these are planets so you can just fly there. It makes sense for what the game is, but it doesn’t make for a compelling experience. See that mountain? You can go to your map and fast travel there.*
*I know it doesn’t work that way once you land on a planet, but you know what I mean
I did actually enjoy starfield (it wasn’t amazing or anything, but I don’t regret my purchase), but I have to say, I hate this argument.
For one thing, being a Bethesda game doesn’t just immediately grant a pass for being bad in all the ways Bethesda games are generally always bad (bugs, bad facial animations, outdated mechanics, etc). Each game should be judged for how good of a game it is, not how good a " Bethesda game" it is.
Secondly, and more importantly, the fact is that this time around is especially bad simply because all the typical “Bethesda” issues are just starting to become more and more egregious as time goes on. The fact is that if you handed me this game and told me that it was a heavily modded copy of FO4 I’d 100% believe you. Nothing in this game really shows a meaningful step forward either in tech or gameplay from what we’ve seen before. The only real “new” thing is ship to ship combat, which is frankly very lackluster.
As for what people expected? Better. That’s pretty much the long and the short of it. They expected it to feel less clunky than FO4, they expected space travel mechanics that weren’t just glorified fast travel menus, and new gameplay that doesn’t just feel like the same shit Bethesda has been doing since Morrowind.
That being said, the worldbuilding is phenomenal, as is typical of Bethesda, and at least for me, that’s where most of the fun came in, just wandering around and doing side quests to explore more of the world. But once you’ve more or less explored the world, there’s not much left to draw you in. The gameplay itself certainly hasn’t been fun enough to make me seriously consider a newgame+ any time soon.