I’m curious what the design, and reaction to, of Starfield might say about what we’ll expect from ES6. For three games now (Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield), have been marked by Settlement building and Radiant quests.
While radiant quests were there in Skyrim, in these later games it felt a lot like Bethesda were making it a core part of the mission design structure. There are a lot of blurred lines in Starfield that make it difficult to tell them apart. (That’s more a comment on main missions being so generic than the radiant quests being so good, unfortunately).
Settlement building seems to be a core part of Bethesda’s DNA now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the narrative follows a Kingmaker style where you build up a settlement of rebels over time or similar. I imagine the other ES staples will be tied to this too, Thieves Guild = establishing a branch within your new settlement to attack Big Bad Evil Vs joining an established one etc.
I really wonder how much of this poor reaction to Starfield makes its way through to actual change, but my feeling is ES6 will have a lot of hype, but similar feelings of disappointment. I hope I’m proved wrong.
It would get them some more downloads, but it might just be too difficult for them to achieve since their games are all the embodiment of “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
I don’t see settlement building as a core part of Starfield, I am 160h in (NG+3) and have not touched settlement building at all.
It is a feature of the game, but it is completely optional.
Bethesda did not over promise anything, didn’t over hype. They said they wanted to create Skyrim in space, and that is exactly what Starfield is. For better or for worse.
Starfield being a disappointment to some is only because those players over hyped themselves.
Ultimately, unless they deviate from the formulaic structure (follow arrow on compass to have awkward uncanny conversation with a mannequin who tells you to go to copy and paste dungeon where you have asynchronous combat against copy and pasted enemies) eventually, people will have the same gripes with ES6 that they didn’t know they had with Skyrim. At this point, Creation Engine games are nostalgic, but Bethesda thinks they’re still the future.
I read a reviewer that said “It’s a beautiful game about space exploration that has no space exploration” and they were completely right. It’s just fallout in space. Who thought Quick Travel the game would be compelling space exploration
But it’s not Fallout in Space. I can travel from one edge of the map to the other in Fallout or Skyrim and stumble upon a pitched battle or a cultist ritual or a lost dog or a juicy plot hook. In Starfield I can travel from one interstitial area to the next interstitial area to listen to a bland NPC tell me to go to the next interstitial area.
It’s okay. I look forward to mods. Right now it’s like somebody reskinned Super Mario Bros from the NES with a generative image AI trained on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day and Mass Effect 1 stills.
Everything is way better and more detailed in Cyberpunk.
It feels like everybody is so generic in Starfield. They don’t feel like they have personalities.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Cyberpunk and you’ll be dealing with an entirely new set of gangs with their own slang and their own backgrounds and their own heritage.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Starfield and you’ll either find nothing or an entrance to another procgen cave with the same spacers as everywhere else.
That’s what I found really interesting about Cyberpunk 2077.
It took me a long time before I even started using fast travel in that game. I actually enjoyed walking through the city. Even on later replays and when I’d finished almost all the side quests.
Far from perfect game even after all the bug fixes, and kinda empty after the end game, but I can’t help thinking it illustrates how Bethesda’s been left behind in many ways. It’ll be interesting to see what the next GTA’s like. If they manage to make a more immersive world to explore.
I gave up on Starfield to try Cyberpunk again with the new fixes and I’m now probably 150 hours in and I think I’ve only fast travelled once? Maybe three or four times if you count the mid mission moments where you’re riding in a car with someone.
It’s kind of wild that Neon had to be split in half by a loading screen, but you can go from one end of Night City to the other with none, and Night City is way more detailed, and quite frankly probably has more unique geometry to load and render than Neon + entire surrounding planet.
There is an argument to be made that Half-Life: Alyx runs on a “modified Quake engine”. At no point was the engine completely rewritten, though it went through several major evolutions and presumably none of Carmack’s original Quake code still survives… probably.
What matters is that Valve made several major overhauls over the years and is well aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of its engine and taylors its games to them. I mean, you couldn’t run Elite Dangerous on Source 2, but nobody asked. Seemingly, nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of multiplayer (hence Fallout 76), and nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of half the shit that Starfield would have to provide for exploration to be compelling in the way that it is in Skyrim.
Absolutely. I stopped playing it because it just wasn’t fun, 2.0 is much better. Bikes are way more usable, but I’d love to be able to hoon the cars like a GTA game.
Edit: Ok, I figured it out. You can’t hammer the gas all the time. The driving works more like an actual car than a GTA game. So if you drive more like Forza, you can actually hoon the cars. Bikes are more tolerant to full throttle. Controllers having a variable input for the throttle allow you to control throttle like a gas pedal. So higher acceleration cars become drivable with less throttle and hammering gas produces a “realistic” ice rink feel, as desired. I still prefer Jackie’s bike despite this understanding.
For me it’s not so much the travel; the main story tries to sell this idea of exploring the unknown, but literally everything you find is a known quantity in some form or another.
A lot of those physics-y space games like Empyrion and Space Engineers are a way more fun way of interacting with custom ships and space than Starfield is, for sure.
Same with me. As soon as I realized that there is no sane way to travel from planet to planet even within the same system without fast travel, I stopped playing the game. Starfield literally made space boring.
Fast travel is the only sane way, without changing the lore and setting of the world, to travel from planet to planet inside of a system.
Space is gigantic and even the distance between planets in a system are huge.
Travel between planets, without having to wait real time hours or days to arrive, would need some kind of faster than light propulsion, but the only way to travel faster then light in the lore and world setting is with gravjumps.
The only thing I would change with the current space travel is using micro gravjumps animation between planets instead of the normal fly sequence shown when travelling inside of a system.
But that’s more or less what they have done with the flyby animation shown when travelling inside of a system. You could interpret that as watching a rapidly speed up version of the, boring because space is a huge and empty void, travel.
I am just bummed about it that’s all. I feel like it would have served the game better if it had mass effect style fast travel menu because realistic space travel doesn’t add a lot to the game if you can only fight in space but not travel from place to place.
And Tolkien was not forced to hinder the Hobbits from inventing full automatic guns, but the Lord of the Rings would be completely different if he hadn’t.
And the same is true for Starfield and other options of FTL. It would be a completely different game, with a completely different story.
Starfield is hard sci-fi at it’s core, with the exception of the grav drive and the powers/unity, a near future setting that is in most parts plausible and possible, a realistic game set in a realistic universe.
The designers chose this setting and lore, and could have chosen otherwise for the sake of game experience.
Additionally, there’s no reason for the fast travel to have to be distinct, separate from gameplay, as loading screens.
Elite Dangerous keeps you in your cockpit, replaces the outside view with an animation while it loads the system you’re jumping to. When landing on a planet, there are various “entering the atmosphere” effects on suitable planets to mask swapping from space to the landable planet.
For ED, in-system FTL is time consuming and you can shave off around 25% of the travel time by doing it manually (risking overshooting and having to loop back around), or you can have the ship’s computer do it. ED is multiplayer and you can be yanked from this “supercruise” by players and NPC pirates, so it works mechanically to make the player waste time with it. In Starfield they could show you the ETA and give you the option to skip it or to wander around your ship during it while the ship does its thing.
If you’re in a menu on your ship when FTL would end with autopilot, stop the clock before leaving FTL, pop up a message in the corner saying the ship is ready to drop from FTL, and let the player exit it manually from the cockpit so you can’t get ambushed while you’re on the other side of your ship.
No changes to setting or lore needed, except that there’s a basic autopilot now.
As far as programming that goes, the engine already uses loading during gameplay when you’re on the overworld, and they have done that since Oblivion. Overworld is set up in chunks, they keep a certain number in each direction around you loaded, and load/unload while you move around.
I won’t say it would be easy to expand that background loading functionality, but I will say that they’ve had many many years to attempt it.
Feel like this games gonna get the NMS treatment and be relatively playable maybe 3 years down the line…
As it stands the game has some merits (tons of planets, dungeons are compelling enough while you’re still seeing new ones) but it feels like the size of the world really caused the world design overall to suffer.
It really got nowhere, and then started charging premium subscriptions to cover most of the mechanics that have sucked since day 1. Repair kits? You got em. You’re not constantly locked in the treadmill of deciding to do something and giving up halfway to go farm screws from office fans because your weapons have degraded to useless conditions. You pay to avoid bullshit like that.
Doesn’t sound like it got there, sounds like they might have improved their netcode, which was spaghetti to be perfectly honest so easy to have improved upon, and maybe the engine use for things not T-posing and floating around. I’m sure those bat fuckers are technically internally still dragons though. The core gameplay loop still sucks. Pick a direction, veer off to fix your shit, and ultimately get annoyed because there’s only so many fucking times I can go to the adhesive shed or the fucking office with all the fans before I’m just done with the worst mechanic ever invented.
I honestly don’t think so. NMS sky started from a rock solid space exploration engine, but that was basically it, and has then layered on most of the other parts of a space sim on top since then, but most of Starfield’s biggest issues seem to be because their game engine can’t handle the scales needed for seamless space exploration.
So at this point Starfield devs have spent a ton of time and effort building a space sim game on an engine not suited for it, and that means that every cut scene and animation and scripted event is built around this engine, making it really time consuming just to bug test, let alone fix any problems that arise from changing or upgrading that engine, let alone designing the old missions and stuff to work with more continuous travel.
I have more faith that 5 years from now NMS will be fleshed out into a really rich and full story driven game, then that Starfield will have fixed it’s fundamental exploration / loading screen problems.
Starfield was built on an ancient engine that’s always been for ground-based games.
It’s such a huge sunk cost fallacy that keeps Bethesda using the same dogshit engine. “We’ve used it for years!” Yeah but it’s been fucking garbage for years too.
I bet you would be surprised if you were to find out that it is possible already. In space one can already move from one planet to another, only thing that is missing is the loading of new space “map” on demand. And more importantly move from one planet to another and then dock with spacestation. As shown by https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/3541.
Now you might ask the very obvious question: why isn’t this correctly implemented to allow seamless travel in both space and on planets in vanilla Starfield? We may know only after someone does full introspection what happened during development but my speculative guess is that Xbox Series S which is much weaker than X is the primary reason for all this segmentation in all aspects of Starfield.
Traversal is technically possible yes, but it’s not possible to traverse at a speed which would be feasible or fun, indicating that their engine isn’t capable of unloading and loading new assets in fast enough as you move around. Probably the same reason that even Neon needs to be hard split in half instead of just unloading the assets from the part of the city you’re not at at the moment.
And bruh blaming the S with no information is asinine when not a single other game struggles with traversal on it, including massive open world’s like GTAV, Cyberpunk, Flight Simulator and even other space sims like NMS.
Given that this game also chose to procedurally spawn the same bases over and over again, I think their issues are firmly routed in their development process, not hardware limitations.
Traversal is technically possible yes, but it’s not possible to traverse at a speed which would be feasible or fun, indicating that their engine isn’t capable of unloading and loading new assets in fast enough as you move around. Probably the same reason that even Neon needs to be hard split in half instead of just unloading the assets from the part of the city you’re not at at the moment.
Speeds that the above mentioned mod adds. Until CK is added the debate of switching of one space map to another seamlessly is useless, since the current implementation is missing the hook to load the next map whilst the same hook is implemented between ship take off and space (even when player is not at the helm). Yeah, but New Atlantis is much bigger and allows the player to boost pack from the MAST top floor to another skyscrapers roof and then get down to commercial level and trade stuff without any load screens, at least on PC.
And bruh blaming the S with no information is asinine when not a single other game struggles with traversal on it, including massive open world’s like GTAV, Cyberpunk, Flight Simulator and even other space sims like NMS.
It’s worth noting that out of all the platforms that Larian has developed its masterpiece for, the Xbox Series S is probably the most restrictive. This is because it only has 8GB of high-bandwidth memory, to store the game while running and use as VRAM (the remaining 2GB gets used for system functions).
The graphs start at the beginning of September, with the game using just over 5.2GB for general game RAM and around 3.5GB for VRAM. By November, though, Larian had shaved this down to 4.7GB and 2.3GB respectively. The RAM reduction is a pretty decent 10% drop but the reduction in VRAM usage is a massive 34%.
Gneitling pointed to the “almost non-existent” RAM increase from current-gen systems to Xbox Series S as a major pain point. Also “it always scaled on PC” is nonsense. Every AAA game in the past decade or so has their assets made once so they run on min spec. Increasing sample counts a bit here and there for high settings isn’t what you could truly have done with more power. Min spec matters.
The article has many such remarks from other devs as well. So why couldn’t the segmentation of Starfield be because of Xbox Series S? Keep in mind the latter article is now roughly three years old.
Because Larian specifically struggles with local co-op, not with loading new sections of the map.
As I’ve said, Cyberpunk runs perfectly fine on the S while loading in more geometry faster on the fly, and it’s far from alone in that. Starfield’s limitations are clearly a result of Bethesda’s ancient engine and not hardware limitations since other devs using different engines can accomplish what they failed at on the same hardware.
I’m sorry but Bethesda doesn’t deserve three years to make a game work. They should make it work on launch and delay it until it’s worth launching. They have billions of dollars and ownership from a major tech conglomerate. It’s entirely unacceptable for them to release an unfinished product.
Games are never finished now with the internet. The whole industry has agreed to say “fuck it, we’ll fix it in post” for basically every single project.
The funny thing is, I think the fact that the RPG mechanics are finally better than the last game developed by Bethesda, instead of worse, highlights just how mediocre Bethesda games are.
I still think once mods and DLCs come out in full force it will be remembered more positively.
Sure. I think big budget gaming needs to die, and games need more dev time for less work and higher pay, with worse graphical fidelity and better art styles.
If Bethesda games are so mediocre, why are they so popular among players who love to put hundreds of hours into them? I can’t imagine them all playing total conversion mods.
It’s become such a custom to poop on Bethesda for making “shallow”, “uninteresting” games that still everybody talks about. As if there weren’t enough real flaws in their games to give them heat for.
That’s not the definition of mediocrity. Trying to appeal to a bigger audience doesn’t make a game mediocre in the same way not every niche game has the potential of being a masterpiece just by not being that much likeable.
What’s good and what’s popular do not necessarily align. Removing “complicated” features for the sake of mass appeal makes the game worse, but more profitable, much of the time.
Agreed. Twas the only thing I thought while playing. This would be better with mods. Which is a sad state because I spent real money on a mod sandbox without the mods.
Yep, I had below Fallout 4 expectations and actually ended up enjoying it more, as I highly value the RPG aspects. It’s still a completely mediocre RPG, but it has a huge sandbox and a ton of potential.
Bought Starfield, still can’t play it. Linux, nvidia no MUX switch. Starfield won’t use the discrete GPU. Doesn’t even know its there. Thrown every launch option I could find at it. Uninstalled and hidden now. Worst purchases I ever made on a game.
Oldrim and Starfield are the only bethesda games I didn’t buy on super sale. I’ll never make that mistake again. I even purposefully bought it without waiting for sales to throw some support to the devs for building the majority of my favorite games I’ve ever played.
The up side is that after about two weeks of tinkering I bought Baldurs Gate 3 on a whim. Been playing it non stop ever since. I might not have bought BG3 if bethesdas didn’t have such a shity unpayable game at launch, so in a way I thank them. BG3 has far exceeded my every expectation. What I thought would be a mediocre time waster turned out to be the best game I’ve ever played.
…why didn’t you just refund it?
Even if you passed the 2h window because of troubleshooting, Steam Support would probably still allow it if you explained you couldn’t get it to work at all
Yes I’ve done so much tinkering to everything I can possibly do. Like 5 hours of 2 minute game time testing. Enough to negate a steam refund!
Telling proton to use prime-run. Custom protons, every launch option that matched my specs on protondb.
__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia %command% doesn’t work at all.
It’s not just a Linux issue. I read on steam, a guy only got Starfield to launch in windows after disabling his primary GPU in bios via MUX which sadly isn’t an option for me.
I’ve tried everything but Wayland. If you’ve got some magic to try I’m all ears.
If you have a newer Nvidia card, Wayland works just fine, and more optimally than X in multi-monitor scenarios, as X locks the refresh rate to the lowest monitor’s setting across the board.
I have a 3090 and Wayland lets me use all three of my monitors at their native refresh rates.
It’s funny that you’re bitching about the game being bad because it doesn’t run on an OS it wasn’t designed to run on. That’s kind of a silly thing to get up in arms about. Linux gamers are lucky that Proton works as well as it does the majority of the time, and I think you’ve taken that aspect for granted.
It’s funny that you’re removed about the game being bad because it doesn’t run on an OS it wasn’t designed to run on. That’s kind of a silly thing to get up in arms about. Linux gamers are lucky that Proton works as well as it does the majority of the time, and I think you’ve taken that aspect for granted.
Maybe so. Seems like there is a bunch of removed about the game to go around even on windows using nvidia though. And if Larian can get it right you’d think bethesda could. Even on windows.
Also I have no idea if the game is bad. I cant even play it so I cant say if the game sucks or not. Here in a few years when it’s playable if it’s playable I’ll make that decision. By then the modding community will have had a chance to do their thing and hopefully make the game an even better game.
Nobody has ever respected Bethesda for their quality work on engines.
Larian also has not been famously known for the last three decades as the studio with the most bugs on AAA titles.
Modding will kick off more next year when they release the official kits and tools. Surprised that wasn’t priority number 2 after ironing out the bugs.
Also, what distro are you running? I didn’t have problems getting it to work on Endeavour, once I got a Steam copy. You can’t run the Xbox launcher games properly AFAIK and they’re markedly worse for modding anyways.
You have it running on a muxless optimus laptop? What launch options are you using and what proton?
Bought SF through steam as well.
Tried EOS before Garuda. Following the asus-linux instructions they recommended manually installing nvidia drivers. Following the arch wiki I bricked my install a few times before moving on. Like I said in another post I give no shade to EOS as it was defiantly operator error. I think I was trying to use mkinitcpio to rebuild initramfs and if I remember correctly EOS uses dracut. At least thats what I think I remember causing my issue, been around a year ago.
Yeah EOS uses Dracut, that’s probably the issue there.
I’ve had success using the Nvidia-DKMS package on both a laptop (with a 1650) and the aforementioned 3090 machine.
I’ve never had to manually rebuild initramfs, whenever a major enough system upgrade happens the package manager is designed to automatically rebuild the file, which typically happens every time you update the Nvidia drivers.
Does Garuda have the option to use the DKMS package? I think that’s what made the difference for me.
I love Starfield, not as much as I love Skyrim or even Morrowind, but I really love it.
I am at 160ish hours and have seen only a small amount of the quests and barely touched the base or ship building part.
There is so much in the game and with the innovative spin on new game plus I am able to build my own narrative again and again.
I can play the perfect angle in one NG+ and a devil in another, I can be the freedom loving Ranger in the next, a mad loner who only interacts with others as much as needed to finish his perfect planetary base, or a starship fanatic who wants to collect and/or build the best ships.
You don’t have those kinds of freedom with Baldurs Gate 3 or other RPGs, you can’t really leave or mostly ignore the narratives of those games to create your own, not on the scale as it is possible with Starfield.
Starfields quests are fun, yes they are all separate from each other but that is in my eyes a good thing in this case as it allows to play the game as you like.
All the quests are like basic Lego blocks, you can connect them together in any way you want but they don’t change each other but that’s not needed as I have my own narrative and stories in my mind for this run or character.
Sure, games like Baldurs Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2.0 have better storytelling, better NPCs, but they are at the same time extremely limited and narrow experiences, sure you have side quests and all but once played the game that’s mostly it.
Starfields freedoms come with limits like the loading screens sure, but that is a price I am willing to pay for having a sandbox like universe to explore and roleplay in.
As a pure entertainment product, that can be consumed without any own creativity, is Baldurs Gate better, without doubt.
But as a expansion tool for your imagination, that’s where Starfield (or any other Bethesda RPG) shines.
But as a end note: What have the Starfield developers consumed when they created the utterly bad and boring temple “puzzles”. In Todd’s name WHY???
Your love for the game is valid but criticisms of the game are also valid. The biggest flaw starfield has is the massive amount of gameworld it provides. In skyrim, CP2077, BG3, Morrowind, Zelda, and whatever else you want to think of, you can pick a direction and go.
In nearly every case, the game is designed to take you somewhere, give you something, reward you for straying off the main path. In Starfield, both space and planet side, youre likely to run into a whole lot of nothing. Which is realistically fine, the universe is already a vast amount of nothing, but in game design that makes for a boring and lackluster RPG and that is the biggest problem SF has. That doesnt take away from the players like you who want this experience though, but thats kind of why Space Sim games are a niche experience.
The problem is how disjointed everything is. Skyrim and Fallout, I can literally walk across the entire map. I can run into a random plot, some fun environmental storytelling, anything really - there’s no sense of discovery for a game so vast as Starfield. Everything is a known quantity which is why you can fast travel to and from basically every area.
All these other functions built into the game are superficial and/or incomplete at best. Ship building is basically pointless, as you can carry a massive crew in a tiny freighter, regardless of crew capacity or passenger capacity of your vessel. Modding weapons is more or less the same as it was in Fallout 4. The environments that are available to explore are all dead with fuck all, and all the tunnels and mines are filled with the same bullet-sponge spacer enemies. You would think with smaller, chunked zones we’d have some very detailed environments that make use of the fact that they are relatively small spaces, but instead everything is truncated with a loading screen and entirely lacking in depth.
I have played and completed it, very recently, and I stand to my words.
BG3 has a great story and it was fun to play once. But it is not a game I will play again, at least not for years.
BG3 is like a good movie, impressive and great story telling but after I seen it once it is done and will go on the shelf.
That’s where Starfield differs, in BG3 I command great written characters through adventures, in Starfield I play more or less an avatar of myself but on a Spaceship. And that is something I come back to again and again, just like I go back to Skyrim, Morrowind or Fallout for years now.
Maybe you have Not realized just how much your choices affect the “linear Story” and how much permutation there is in follow up quests or alternate pathways through the same quest. I guess thats the beauty of it. Most of the quests an Narrative fit into each other so neat One might suspect this way was the only possible way, just because of how good it is presented.
Yes, but that still is like reading the same book but with a few pages changed. I am still only moving characters through a stage play, not roleplaying.
I can’t have a completely changed or different way to play the game or be myself/anything in the world of the game.
Both games are great but they can’t really be compared, not much more as you could compare a high budget musical with a high budget improv theatre play.
Sure both are plays on a theatre stage (or RPG in case of the games) but beside that they don’t have really much in common.
But maybe it is just to complicated for me to fully express or explain what I mean as I am not a native speaker and I am therefore limited in my words and formulations.
As a pure entertainment product, that can be consumed without any own creativity, is Baldurs Gate better, without doubt. But as a expansion tool for your imagination, that’s where Starfield (or any other Bethesda RPG) shines.
You should seriously, seriously go play BG3.
You don’t have those kinds of freedom with Baldurs Gate 3 or other RPGs, you can’t really leave or mostly ignore the narratives of those games to create your own, not on the scale as it is possible with Starfield.
Seriously, BG3. (Between Dark Urge, custom character choices, etc, go.)
I have played it and I liked it.
But after completing it with one character I have no intention of doing another play through anytime soon.
Yes you have different character choices but in the end it is always the same linear story.
Yes, you could say the same about Starfield but it is not.
In Starfield if I want I can ignore the main quest more or less completely and play a bounty hunter who only builds his base to have a place for his collection of coffee cups he takes from every place he goes.
In BG3 they give you predefined experience (now in Dark Urge flavour) which is great for telling a story but not so great for creating a world to really roleplay in.
Both games are fun for what they are, they are just not fun in the same way for everyone.
I think i See your point now with the example of the bounty hunter.
The point that most People are making is thta starfield is a really blank canvas where you can Insert your own Narrative into a lot of Actions but the game does Not react towards that Narrative, while BG3 does react to some of your RP reasons and all the other reasons for your RP that the game cannot predict, it cannot react to and therefore feel unsupported.
That is a valid Take that Bethesda games have Solid setting in which People can choose internal Roleplay but this does Not meant other games where the game also gives you external Stimulation to Roleplay certain aspects Limit your creativity. For my playtrough there were several decisions which where reflected in the World but also other principles that i made up, that only influenced my decisions passivly without beeing spelled out in the Texts.
For example i choose a knowdledge hungry Wizard which made me Do queationable choice s with devils even tho 2 People of my Party already suffered under devils. No choice spelled out “Gimme All knowledge of the Planes what ever the Cost” but thats where my own internal RP made the choice more fitting than other.
Man its really Hard to express my thoughts on this using a foreign languages. I hope my point comes across
It is a role-playing on a different level, and with that it has its own merits and shortcomings.
Baldurs Gate 3 is a role play on a lower, more character centric, level which limits the freedom of the player but allows for the game to have a tighter, more interconnected storytelling.
Starfield is a role play on a higher, more player centric, level which allows for way more personal freedom of the player at the costs of having a story with pieces flying loose through the air, so to speak.
The venn diagram of people who like both of those types will most likely don’t have a huge overlap.
Neither of those games are bad, they are just fundamentally different.
I am at 160ish hours and have seen only a small amount of the quests
So you’ve just been having fun with the most basic of systems that are not much different from all previous games, while barely having touched the things most people are complaining about? The mechanics and stability are pretty good. It’s the bland stories within the uninspired quests that are a major source of disappointment.
And to say only a Bethesda RPG does while BG3 doesn’t have the kinds of roleplaying you’re describing tells me you haven’t actually played BG3. Or any actually good RPG for that matter.
I really regret thinking the extra time to polish would result in a game where we don’t need modders to make things decent. The mod tools aren’t even out and people have rebalanced multiple systems to be way better than Bethesda came up with.
Sorry to be unclear, I was being sarcastic and agree with you. The awards are rightfully based on what is actually released, which discourages this habit.
Gotcha, sadly, these are some people’s sentiment regarding AAA studios. Modders are a blessing but then these companies find ways to exploit the passion of their community and fans.
From what I understand they even fucked with the engine so much that they made modding even harder now and for whatever reason they’re not releasing the mod tools any time soon so the big names aren’t even trying to mod the game…
It’s like they looked at what made all their previous titles popular, looked at the community, and said “nah, fuck that. What the people really want is no mod support, 6 distinct POIs, and TONS of loading screens.”
When a game like Hardspace has better writing than your game, you fucked up.
Which is not a knock on Hardspace by-the-by. It’s just that writing isn’t the focus of that game, and even Blackbird said, “let’s take a big swing at this anyways”.
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My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Yeah, it isn’t the best game, so it doesn’t belong between the nominations.
Also because so many amazing games came out this year.
But that doesn’t make it a bad game though. Had plenty of fun with it.
Played my full version demo before purchasing. Was bored on day one. None of this surprises me.
I like it 🤷♂️
congratz
Thanks!
I’m curious what the design, and reaction to, of Starfield might say about what we’ll expect from ES6. For three games now (Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield), have been marked by Settlement building and Radiant quests.
While radiant quests were there in Skyrim, in these later games it felt a lot like Bethesda were making it a core part of the mission design structure. There are a lot of blurred lines in Starfield that make it difficult to tell them apart. (That’s more a comment on main missions being so generic than the radiant quests being so good, unfortunately).
Settlement building seems to be a core part of Bethesda’s DNA now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the narrative follows a Kingmaker style where you build up a settlement of rebels over time or similar. I imagine the other ES staples will be tied to this too, Thieves Guild = establishing a branch within your new settlement to attack Big Bad Evil Vs joining an established one etc.
I really wonder how much of this poor reaction to Starfield makes its way through to actual change, but my feeling is ES6 will have a lot of hype, but similar feelings of disappointment. I hope I’m proved wrong.
I can’t imagine Beth cares about game awards as long as their sales are good.
It would get them some more downloads, but it might just be too difficult for them to achieve since their games are all the embodiment of “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
The thing is that a lot of players like it that way, but it won’t ever win any awards.
I don’t see settlement building as a core part of Starfield, I am 160h in (NG+3) and have not touched settlement building at all. It is a feature of the game, but it is completely optional.
Bethesda did not over promise anything, didn’t over hype. They said they wanted to create Skyrim in space, and that is exactly what Starfield is. For better or for worse.
Starfield being a disappointment to some is only because those players over hyped themselves.
Ultimately, unless they deviate from the formulaic structure (follow arrow on compass to have awkward uncanny conversation with a mannequin who tells you to go to copy and paste dungeon where you have asynchronous combat against copy and pasted enemies) eventually, people will have the same gripes with ES6 that they didn’t know they had with Skyrim. At this point, Creation Engine games are nostalgic, but Bethesda thinks they’re still the future.
I read a reviewer that said “It’s a beautiful game about space exploration that has no space exploration” and they were completely right. It’s just fallout in space. Who thought Quick Travel the game would be compelling space exploration
But it’s not Fallout in Space. I can travel from one edge of the map to the other in Fallout or Skyrim and stumble upon a pitched battle or a cultist ritual or a lost dog or a juicy plot hook. In Starfield I can travel from one interstitial area to the next interstitial area to listen to a bland NPC tell me to go to the next interstitial area.
It’s okay. I look forward to mods. Right now it’s like somebody reskinned Super Mario Bros from the NES with a generative image AI trained on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day and Mass Effect 1 stills.
Everything is way better and more detailed in Cyberpunk.
It feels like everybody is so generic in Starfield. They don’t feel like they have personalities.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Cyberpunk and you’ll be dealing with an entirely new set of gangs with their own slang and their own backgrounds and their own heritage.
You travel 10KM in any direction in Starfield and you’ll either find nothing or an entrance to another procgen cave with the same spacers as everywhere else.
No way, Super Mario Bros. has much more fun gameplay.
That’s what I found really interesting about Cyberpunk 2077.
It took me a long time before I even started using fast travel in that game. I actually enjoyed walking through the city. Even on later replays and when I’d finished almost all the side quests.
Far from perfect game even after all the bug fixes, and kinda empty after the end game, but I can’t help thinking it illustrates how Bethesda’s been left behind in many ways. It’ll be interesting to see what the next GTA’s like. If they manage to make a more immersive world to explore.
I gave up on Starfield to try Cyberpunk again with the new fixes and I’m now probably 150 hours in and I think I’ve only fast travelled once? Maybe three or four times if you count the mid mission moments where you’re riding in a car with someone.
It’s kind of wild that Neon had to be split in half by a loading screen, but you can go from one end of Night City to the other with none, and Night City is way more detailed, and quite frankly probably has more unique geometry to load and render than Neon + entire surrounding planet.
The reason for that is because, yet again, for the three hundred thousandth fucking time, Bethesda is using, still, a modified creation engine.
There is an argument to be made that Half-Life: Alyx runs on a “modified Quake engine”. At no point was the engine completely rewritten, though it went through several major evolutions and presumably none of Carmack’s original Quake code still survives… probably.
What matters is that Valve made several major overhauls over the years and is well aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of its engine and taylors its games to them. I mean, you couldn’t run Elite Dangerous on Source 2, but nobody asked. Seemingly, nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of multiplayer (hence Fallout 76), and nobody at Bethesda corporate asked if CE was capable of half the shit that Starfield would have to provide for exploration to be compelling in the way that it is in Skyrim.
I just wish CP2077’s driving was better, I find it impossible to drive the good cars.
Much better after the bug fixes, but still far from perfect. Agreed.
I stuck to bikes which were fun to drive around.
Absolutely. I stopped playing it because it just wasn’t fun, 2.0 is much better. Bikes are way more usable, but I’d love to be able to hoon the cars like a GTA game.
Edit: Ok, I figured it out. You can’t hammer the gas all the time. The driving works more like an actual car than a GTA game. So if you drive more like Forza, you can actually hoon the cars. Bikes are more tolerant to full throttle. Controllers having a variable input for the throttle allow you to control throttle like a gas pedal. So higher acceleration cars become drivable with less throttle and hammering gas produces a “realistic” ice rink feel, as desired. I still prefer Jackie’s bike despite this understanding.
For me it’s not so much the travel; the main story tries to sell this idea of exploring the unknown, but literally everything you find is a known quantity in some form or another.
Every planet has at least 10 bases filled with pirates or mercenaries.
… within eyesight of a mysterious temple that only Constellation is aware of for some reason.
I didn’t think the lack of space exploration would bother me so much.
But after playing the Pirate quest and just fast traveling over and over, my immersion broke and realized how little I’m really traveling.
Empyrion is a way better game about space exploration and i’d never consider it for a GOTY award.
A lot of those physics-y space games like Empyrion and Space Engineers are a way more fun way of interacting with custom ships and space than Starfield is, for sure.
What’s the point in making a game “as stable as possible”,
when it’s not even fun?
Aren’t you just polishing shit at that point?
It is more stable than their other releases, but that’s a very low bar.
I’d never call it stable without that very important context.
Plus, it doesn’t pass that bar by more than a few inches.
I played it for 30 min and did not enjoy it past the first 10.
Can’t really form an opinion about an RPG in 30 minutes playtime. Hell, I doubt you even know Starfield has magic powers.
It was influenced by the internet calling it bad, you are allowed to admit it.
Just don’t call it your opinion.
Same with me. As soon as I realized that there is no sane way to travel from planet to planet even within the same system without fast travel, I stopped playing the game. Starfield literally made space boring.
Fast travel is the only sane way, without changing the lore and setting of the world, to travel from planet to planet inside of a system. Space is gigantic and even the distance between planets in a system are huge. Travel between planets, without having to wait real time hours or days to arrive, would need some kind of faster than light propulsion, but the only way to travel faster then light in the lore and world setting is with gravjumps.
The only thing I would change with the current space travel is using micro gravjumps animation between planets instead of the normal fly sequence shown when travelling inside of a system.
They could implement a timewarp mechanic like Kerbal Space program does and just speed up time.
But that’s more or less what they have done with the flyby animation shown when travelling inside of a system. You could interpret that as watching a rapidly speed up version of the, boring because space is a huge and empty void, travel.
Kinda seems like they used the lore to justify the load screens, and not the other way around to me. But that’s just a theory… A Game Theory!
I am just bummed about it that’s all. I feel like it would have served the game better if it had mass effect style fast travel menu because realistic space travel doesn’t add a lot to the game if you can only fight in space but not travel from place to place.
So? The writers weren’t forced to make there only be grav drives
And Tolkien was not forced to hinder the Hobbits from inventing full automatic guns, but the Lord of the Rings would be completely different if he hadn’t.
And the same is true for Starfield and other options of FTL. It would be a completely different game, with a completely different story.
Starfield is hard sci-fi at it’s core, with the exception of the grav drive and the powers/unity, a near future setting that is in most parts plausible and possible, a realistic game set in a realistic universe.
The designers chose this setting and lore, and could have chosen otherwise for the sake of game experience.
Additionally, there’s no reason for the fast travel to have to be distinct, separate from gameplay, as loading screens.
Elite Dangerous keeps you in your cockpit, replaces the outside view with an animation while it loads the system you’re jumping to. When landing on a planet, there are various “entering the atmosphere” effects on suitable planets to mask swapping from space to the landable planet.
For ED, in-system FTL is time consuming and you can shave off around 25% of the travel time by doing it manually (risking overshooting and having to loop back around), or you can have the ship’s computer do it. ED is multiplayer and you can be yanked from this “supercruise” by players and NPC pirates, so it works mechanically to make the player waste time with it. In Starfield they could show you the ETA and give you the option to skip it or to wander around your ship during it while the ship does its thing.
If you’re in a menu on your ship when FTL would end with autopilot, stop the clock before leaving FTL, pop up a message in the corner saying the ship is ready to drop from FTL, and let the player exit it manually from the cockpit so you can’t get ambushed while you’re on the other side of your ship.
No changes to setting or lore needed, except that there’s a basic autopilot now.
As far as programming that goes, the engine already uses loading during gameplay when you’re on the overworld, and they have done that since Oblivion. Overworld is set up in chunks, they keep a certain number in each direction around you loaded, and load/unload while you move around.
I won’t say it would be easy to expand that background loading functionality, but I will say that they’ve had many many years to attempt it.
Thats sounds amazing, too bad i dont enjoy Sci-Fi
The fact that this game was actually nominated as “best RPG” with the likes of baldurs gate 3 and final fantasy XVI is ludicrous enough.
to be fair, ffxvi is not really an rpg either.
Feel like this games gonna get the NMS treatment and be relatively playable maybe 3 years down the line…
As it stands the game has some merits (tons of planets, dungeons are compelling enough while you’re still seeing new ones) but it feels like the size of the world really caused the world design overall to suffer.
The sad part is that Microsoft pulled the original 2022 release to fix a lot of the bugs.
So really the updates have to be pretty impactful.
I’m still optimistic, because fallout 76 did finally get there!
This is sarcasm, right?
It really got nowhere, and then started charging premium subscriptions to cover most of the mechanics that have sucked since day 1. Repair kits? You got em. You’re not constantly locked in the treadmill of deciding to do something and giving up halfway to go farm screws from office fans because your weapons have degraded to useless conditions. You pay to avoid bullshit like that.
Doesn’t sound like it got there, sounds like they might have improved their netcode, which was spaghetti to be perfectly honest so easy to have improved upon, and maybe the engine use for things not T-posing and floating around. I’m sure those bat fuckers are technically internally still dragons though. The core gameplay loop still sucks. Pick a direction, veer off to fix your shit, and ultimately get annoyed because there’s only so many fucking times I can go to the adhesive shed or the fucking office with all the fans before I’m just done with the worst mechanic ever invented.
I honestly don’t think so. NMS sky started from a rock solid space exploration engine, but that was basically it, and has then layered on most of the other parts of a space sim on top since then, but most of Starfield’s biggest issues seem to be because their game engine can’t handle the scales needed for seamless space exploration.
So at this point Starfield devs have spent a ton of time and effort building a space sim game on an engine not suited for it, and that means that every cut scene and animation and scripted event is built around this engine, making it really time consuming just to bug test, let alone fix any problems that arise from changing or upgrading that engine, let alone designing the old missions and stuff to work with more continuous travel.
I have more faith that 5 years from now NMS will be fleshed out into a really rich and full story driven game, then that Starfield will have fixed it’s fundamental exploration / loading screen problems.
NMS was purpose-built to be a space game.
Starfield was built on an ancient engine that’s always been for ground-based games.
It’s such a huge sunk cost fallacy that keeps Bethesda using the same dogshit engine. “We’ve used it for years!” Yeah but it’s been fucking garbage for years too.
I bet you would be surprised if you were to find out that it is possible already. In space one can already move from one planet to another, only thing that is missing is the loading of new space “map” on demand. And more importantly move from one planet to another and then dock with spacestation. As shown by https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/3541.
And on planets the landing zones aren’t placed in a vacuum, topological details like mountains are visible from adjacent zones. As shown by https://youtu.be/Fy0eG7MFSTM?si=ZwaE3OzmEf9IxbwZ&t=841 by 2kliksphilip.
Now you might ask the very obvious question: why isn’t this correctly implemented to allow seamless travel in both space and on planets in vanilla Starfield? We may know only after someone does full introspection what happened during development but my speculative guess is that Xbox Series S which is much weaker than X is the primary reason for all this segmentation in all aspects of Starfield.
Traversal is technically possible yes, but it’s not possible to traverse at a speed which would be feasible or fun, indicating that their engine isn’t capable of unloading and loading new assets in fast enough as you move around. Probably the same reason that even Neon needs to be hard split in half instead of just unloading the assets from the part of the city you’re not at at the moment.
And bruh blaming the S with no information is asinine when not a single other game struggles with traversal on it, including massive open world’s like GTAV, Cyberpunk, Flight Simulator and even other space sims like NMS.
Given that this game also chose to procedurally spawn the same bases over and over again, I think their issues are firmly routed in their development process, not hardware limitations.
Speeds that the above mentioned mod adds. Until CK is added the debate of switching of one space map to another seamlessly is useless, since the current implementation is missing the hook to load the next map whilst the same hook is implemented between ship take off and space (even when player is not at the helm). Yeah, but New Atlantis is much bigger and allows the player to boost pack from the MAST top floor to another skyscrapers roof and then get down to commercial level and trade stuff without any load screens, at least on PC.
Expect of course if there were dev stories related to it sprinkling out periodically, latest being from Baldurs Gate 3 devs: https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-dev-shows-off-the-level-of-optimization-achieved-for-the-xbox-series-s-port-which-bodes-well-for-future-pc-updates/
Other devs have stated these: https://www.gamesradar.com/xbox-series-s-could-bottleneck-some-next-gen-games-developers-suggest/
The article has many such remarks from other devs as well. So why couldn’t the segmentation of Starfield be because of Xbox Series S? Keep in mind the latter article is now roughly three years old.
Because Larian specifically struggles with local co-op, not with loading new sections of the map.
As I’ve said, Cyberpunk runs perfectly fine on the S while loading in more geometry faster on the fly, and it’s far from alone in that. Starfield’s limitations are clearly a result of Bethesda’s ancient engine and not hardware limitations since other devs using different engines can accomplish what they failed at on the same hardware.
They’d have to rip out and replace the entire plot, which I don’t think they would do
I’m sorry but Bethesda doesn’t deserve three years to make a game work. They should make it work on launch and delay it until it’s worth launching. They have billions of dollars and ownership from a major tech conglomerate. It’s entirely unacceptable for them to release an unfinished product.
Games are never finished now with the internet. The whole industry has agreed to say “fuck it, we’ll fix it in post” for basically every single project.
Yeah Bethesda doesn’t get the same amount of leeway that a small dev that was clearly way in over their heads gets
It’s just so bland and formulaic. Against deep RPGs like BG3, it just pales in comparison.
The funny thing is, I think the fact that the RPG mechanics are finally better than the last game developed by Bethesda, instead of worse, highlights just how mediocre Bethesda games are.
I still think once mods and DLCs come out in full force it will be remembered more positively.
The difference between a Ubisoft game and a Bethesda game is that Bethesda employees still enjoy coming to work.
Sure. I think big budget gaming needs to die, and games need more dev time for less work and higher pay, with worse graphical fidelity and better art styles.
If Bethesda games are so mediocre, why are they so popular among players who love to put hundreds of hours into them? I can’t imagine them all playing total conversion mods.
It’s become such a custom to poop on Bethesda for making “shallow”, “uninteresting” games that still everybody talks about. As if there weren’t enough real flaws in their games to give them heat for.
Because mediocrity and popularity go hand in hand, it’s the profit motive at work. Being largely inoffensive and generally palatable is profitable.
That’s not the definition of mediocrity. Trying to appeal to a bigger audience doesn’t make a game mediocre in the same way not every niche game has the potential of being a masterpiece just by not being that much likeable.
Some games are popular and good.
What’s good and what’s popular do not necessarily align. Removing “complicated” features for the sake of mass appeal makes the game worse, but more profitable, much of the time.
Also not true. Complexity alone doesn’t make a good game / movie / book / piece of art. And lack thereof doesn’t make anything worse.
Why is it that when many people like a thing because that thing appeals to masses, it’s automatically categorised as lower quality?
Nobody seriously claimed Starfield to be the game of all games. It’s good. It’s fine. It’s not perfect. So what?
Agreed. Twas the only thing I thought while playing. This would be better with mods. Which is a sad state because I spent real money on a mod sandbox without the mods.
Yep, I had below Fallout 4 expectations and actually ended up enjoying it more, as I highly value the RPG aspects. It’s still a completely mediocre RPG, but it has a huge sandbox and a ton of potential.
Bought Starfield, still can’t play it. Linux, nvidia no MUX switch. Starfield won’t use the discrete GPU. Doesn’t even know its there. Thrown every launch option I could find at it. Uninstalled and hidden now. Worst purchases I ever made on a game.
Oldrim and Starfield are the only bethesda games I didn’t buy on super sale. I’ll never make that mistake again. I even purposefully bought it without waiting for sales to throw some support to the devs for building the majority of my favorite games I’ve ever played.
The up side is that after about two weeks of tinkering I bought Baldurs Gate 3 on a whim. Been playing it non stop ever since. I might not have bought BG3 if bethesdas didn’t have such a shity unpayable game at launch, so in a way I thank them. BG3 has far exceeded my every expectation. What I thought would be a mediocre time waster turned out to be the best game I’ve ever played.
…why didn’t you just refund it?
Even if you passed the 2h window because of troubleshooting, Steam Support would probably still allow it if you explained you couldn’t get it to work at all
I tried, steam said NO!
That sounds more like a issue with your proton configuration then a fault of the game.
Have you tried to change the proton configuration, to force it to use the discrete GPU?
Nvidia GPUs are known to be problematic in Linux, not only with Wine/Proton
Yes I’ve done so much tinkering to everything I can possibly do. Like 5 hours of 2 minute game time testing. Enough to negate a steam refund!
Telling proton to use prime-run. Custom protons, every launch option that matched my specs on protondb.
__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia %command%doesn’t work at all.It’s not just a Linux issue. I read on steam, a guy only got Starfield to launch in windows after disabling his primary GPU in bios via MUX which sadly isn’t an option for me.
I’ve tried everything but Wayland. If you’ve got some magic to try I’m all ears.
If you have a newer Nvidia card, Wayland works just fine, and more optimally than X in multi-monitor scenarios, as X locks the refresh rate to the lowest monitor’s setting across the board.
I have a 3090 and Wayland lets me use all three of my monitors at their native refresh rates.
It’s funny that you’re bitching about the game being bad because it doesn’t run on an OS it wasn’t designed to run on. That’s kind of a silly thing to get up in arms about. Linux gamers are lucky that Proton works as well as it does the majority of the time, and I think you’ve taken that aspect for granted.
Maybe so. Seems like there is a bunch of removed about the game to go around even on windows using nvidia though. And if Larian can get it right you’d think bethesda could. Even on windows.
Also I have no idea if the game is bad. I cant even play it so I cant say if the game sucks or not. Here in a few years when it’s playable if it’s playable I’ll make that decision. By then the modding community will have had a chance to do their thing and hopefully make the game an even better game.
Nobody has ever respected Bethesda for their quality work on engines.
Larian also has not been famously known for the last three decades as the studio with the most bugs on AAA titles.
Modding will kick off more next year when they release the official kits and tools. Surprised that wasn’t priority number 2 after ironing out the bugs.
Also, what distro are you running? I didn’t have problems getting it to work on Endeavour, once I got a Steam copy. You can’t run the Xbox launcher games properly AFAIK and they’re markedly worse for modding anyways.
I’m using Garuda.
You have it running on a muxless optimus laptop? What launch options are you using and what proton?
Bought SF through steam as well.
Tried EOS before Garuda. Following the asus-linux instructions they recommended manually installing nvidia drivers. Following the arch wiki I bricked my install a few times before moving on. Like I said in another post I give no shade to EOS as it was defiantly operator error. I think I was trying to use mkinitcpio to rebuild initramfs and if I remember correctly EOS uses dracut. At least thats what I think I remember causing my issue, been around a year ago.
Yeah EOS uses Dracut, that’s probably the issue there.
I’ve had success using the Nvidia-DKMS package on both a laptop (with a 1650) and the aforementioned 3090 machine.
I’ve never had to manually rebuild initramfs, whenever a major enough system upgrade happens the package manager is designed to automatically rebuild the file, which typically happens every time you update the Nvidia drivers.
Does Garuda have the option to use the DKMS package? I think that’s what made the difference for me.
I love Starfield, not as much as I love Skyrim or even Morrowind, but I really love it.
I am at 160ish hours and have seen only a small amount of the quests and barely touched the base or ship building part. There is so much in the game and with the innovative spin on new game plus I am able to build my own narrative again and again. I can play the perfect angle in one NG+ and a devil in another, I can be the freedom loving Ranger in the next, a mad loner who only interacts with others as much as needed to finish his perfect planetary base, or a starship fanatic who wants to collect and/or build the best ships.
You don’t have those kinds of freedom with Baldurs Gate 3 or other RPGs, you can’t really leave or mostly ignore the narratives of those games to create your own, not on the scale as it is possible with Starfield.
Starfields quests are fun, yes they are all separate from each other but that is in my eyes a good thing in this case as it allows to play the game as you like.
All the quests are like basic Lego blocks, you can connect them together in any way you want but they don’t change each other but that’s not needed as I have my own narrative and stories in my mind for this run or character.
Sure, games like Baldurs Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2.0 have better storytelling, better NPCs, but they are at the same time extremely limited and narrow experiences, sure you have side quests and all but once played the game that’s mostly it.
Starfields freedoms come with limits like the loading screens sure, but that is a price I am willing to pay for having a sandbox like universe to explore and roleplay in.
As a pure entertainment product, that can be consumed without any own creativity, is Baldurs Gate better, without doubt. But as a expansion tool for your imagination, that’s where Starfield (or any other Bethesda RPG) shines.
But as a end note: What have the Starfield developers consumed when they created the utterly bad and boring temple “puzzles”. In Todd’s name WHY???
What you are trying to say is that Starfield is a sandbox RPG, while BG3 is a Linear Story RPG.
Both are fun in their own ways. You just vibe more with the sandbox aspect.
I bet you also enjoy Minecraft for the same reasons.
Yeah, I like Minecraft 🤣
Your love for the game is valid but criticisms of the game are also valid. The biggest flaw starfield has is the massive amount of gameworld it provides. In skyrim, CP2077, BG3, Morrowind, Zelda, and whatever else you want to think of, you can pick a direction and go.
In nearly every case, the game is designed to take you somewhere, give you something, reward you for straying off the main path. In Starfield, both space and planet side, youre likely to run into a whole lot of nothing. Which is realistically fine, the universe is already a vast amount of nothing, but in game design that makes for a boring and lackluster RPG and that is the biggest problem SF has. That doesnt take away from the players like you who want this experience though, but thats kind of why Space Sim games are a niche experience.
The problem is how disjointed everything is. Skyrim and Fallout, I can literally walk across the entire map. I can run into a random plot, some fun environmental storytelling, anything really - there’s no sense of discovery for a game so vast as Starfield. Everything is a known quantity which is why you can fast travel to and from basically every area.
All these other functions built into the game are superficial and/or incomplete at best. Ship building is basically pointless, as you can carry a massive crew in a tiny freighter, regardless of crew capacity or passenger capacity of your vessel. Modding weapons is more or less the same as it was in Fallout 4. The environments that are available to explore are all dead with fuck all, and all the tunnels and mines are filled with the same bullet-sponge spacer enemies. You would think with smaller, chunked zones we’d have some very detailed environments that make use of the fact that they are relatively small spaces, but instead everything is truncated with a loading screen and entirely lacking in depth.
You clearly haven’t played baldur’s gate and shouldn’t make comparisons based on your limited experience with it.
I have played and completed it, very recently, and I stand to my words. BG3 has a great story and it was fun to play once. But it is not a game I will play again, at least not for years. BG3 is like a good movie, impressive and great story telling but after I seen it once it is done and will go on the shelf.
That’s where Starfield differs, in BG3 I command great written characters through adventures, in Starfield I play more or less an avatar of myself but on a Spaceship. And that is something I come back to again and again, just like I go back to Skyrim, Morrowind or Fallout for years now.
Maybe you have Not realized just how much your choices affect the “linear Story” and how much permutation there is in follow up quests or alternate pathways through the same quest. I guess thats the beauty of it. Most of the quests an Narrative fit into each other so neat One might suspect this way was the only possible way, just because of how good it is presented.
Yes, but that still is like reading the same book but with a few pages changed. I am still only moving characters through a stage play, not roleplaying.
I can’t have a completely changed or different way to play the game or be myself/anything in the world of the game.
Both games are great but they can’t really be compared, not much more as you could compare a high budget musical with a high budget improv theatre play. Sure both are plays on a theatre stage (or RPG in case of the games) but beside that they don’t have really much in common.
But maybe it is just to complicated for me to fully express or explain what I mean as I am not a native speaker and I am therefore limited in my words and formulations.
You should seriously, seriously go play BG3.
Seriously, BG3. (Between Dark Urge, custom character choices, etc, go.)
I have played it and I liked it. But after completing it with one character I have no intention of doing another play through anytime soon.
Yes you have different character choices but in the end it is always the same linear story. Yes, you could say the same about Starfield but it is not. In Starfield if I want I can ignore the main quest more or less completely and play a bounty hunter who only builds his base to have a place for his collection of coffee cups he takes from every place he goes.
In BG3 they give you predefined experience (now in Dark Urge flavour) which is great for telling a story but not so great for creating a world to really roleplay in.
Both games are fun for what they are, they are just not fun in the same way for everyone.
I think i See your point now with the example of the bounty hunter. The point that most People are making is thta starfield is a really blank canvas where you can Insert your own Narrative into a lot of Actions but the game does Not react towards that Narrative, while BG3 does react to some of your RP reasons and all the other reasons for your RP that the game cannot predict, it cannot react to and therefore feel unsupported.
That is a valid Take that Bethesda games have Solid setting in which People can choose internal Roleplay but this does Not meant other games where the game also gives you external Stimulation to Roleplay certain aspects Limit your creativity. For my playtrough there were several decisions which where reflected in the World but also other principles that i made up, that only influenced my decisions passivly without beeing spelled out in the Texts. For example i choose a knowdledge hungry Wizard which made me Do queationable choice s with devils even tho 2 People of my Party already suffered under devils. No choice spelled out “Gimme All knowledge of the Planes what ever the Cost” but thats where my own internal RP made the choice more fitting than other.
Man its really Hard to express my thoughts on this using a foreign languages. I hope my point comes across
Yes, I can grasp what you mean.
It is a role-playing on a different level, and with that it has its own merits and shortcomings.
Baldurs Gate 3 is a role play on a lower, more character centric, level which limits the freedom of the player but allows for the game to have a tighter, more interconnected storytelling.
Starfield is a role play on a higher, more player centric, level which allows for way more personal freedom of the player at the costs of having a story with pieces flying loose through the air, so to speak.
The venn diagram of people who like both of those types will most likely don’t have a huge overlap.
Neither of those games are bad, they are just fundamentally different.
So you’ve just been having fun with the most basic of systems that are not much different from all previous games, while barely having touched the things most people are complaining about? The mechanics and stability are pretty good. It’s the bland stories within the uninspired quests that are a major source of disappointment.
And to say only a Bethesda RPG does while BG3 doesn’t have the kinds of roleplaying you’re describing tells me you haven’t actually played BG3. Or any actually good RPG for that matter.
Don’t worry Bethesda, you can try again at next year’s game awards after you’ve fixed the bugs and modders have added the features!
I really regret thinking the extra time to polish would result in a game where we don’t need modders to make things decent. The mod tools aren’t even out and people have rebalanced multiple systems to be way better than Bethesda came up with.
Let’s not give developers the habit of relying on modders to finish their games. I’m tired of studios releasing half ass games
Sorry to be unclear, I was being sarcastic and agree with you. The awards are rightfully based on what is actually released, which discourages this habit.
Gotcha, sadly, these are some people’s sentiment regarding AAA studios. Modders are a blessing but then these companies find ways to exploit the passion of their community and fans.
From what I understand they even fucked with the engine so much that they made modding even harder now and for whatever reason they’re not releasing the mod tools any time soon so the big names aren’t even trying to mod the game…
It’s like they looked at what made all their previous titles popular, looked at the community, and said “nah, fuck that. What the people really want is no mod support, 6 distinct POIs, and TONS of loading screens.”
And year after that, and the year after that, and so on for the next 15 years as they re-release it.
They don’t need to rerelease it.
Skyrim Special edition released in 2016 and is still one of the most played games on Steam. (place 69, nice)
after
you’vethe modders have fixed the bugsWhen a game like Hardspace has better writing than your game, you fucked up.
Which is not a knock on Hardspace by-the-by. It’s just that writing isn’t the focus of that game, and even Blackbird said, “let’s take a big swing at this anyways”.
And the early access people hated the plot too.
I wish Hardspace would work again. It had lots of potential before they crippled it.
Yeah, I played it back to back with cyberpunk TPL and it felt pretty sterile and soulless by comparison.
Everyone loves to hate Bethesda