Bethesda games are always boring trash. The real game won’t even appear for another year or two at least (after the modders have finished fixing all the bugs, the horrible writing, the design flaws).
Compared to the average game? I don’t agree. Compared to entirely exceptional games like Fallout: NV, yeah. But you don’t have many options if you enjoy open world fps RPGs, and Bethesda games are sometimes the only passable option. I mean, I’d take Starfield over Elden Ring any day, because of personal preference, not because it’s a better game- but my own preference means I also couldn’t say it’s a worse game.
But you don’t have many options if you enjoy open world fps RPGs, and Bethesda games are sometimes the only passable option.
This is only true if it’s literally true that it has to be “first person”. There are, in my opinion, way too many 3rd person semi-RPGs with a vast, open world that are very similar to Bethesda games. It has gotten to the point with me where there are only so many games like this I’ll even play, because they’re huge time drains and they come across as basically the same game with a different skin or setting.
3rd person semi-RPGs with a vast, open world that are very similar to Bethesda games
With the “charm” of Bethesda game(that I don’t really know how exactly to describe) the only other recent games I can think of are Outer Worlds and Cyberpunk.
I think that may be right for first person only, but many games that are largely played in third person fit the bill to me: Witcher 3, Elden Ring, Horizon, and even the latest Zelda games to an extent.
I know I’m leaving many other titles out here too, I’m just listing ones I’ve personally played.
No Man’s Sky is even close to being on the list IMO but it’s not quite RPG enough to fit in the same category.
Players are really kinda spoiled for choice when it comes to large, open world games with quasi RPG elements.
I’ve personally grown kinda sick of the genre.
There’s standouts of course (I actually think all the ones I listed are pretty excellent), but all of them require hundreds of hours to complete and I’m just sick of the same game type after a while.
It’s not so much about the first personness of it. It is just that the only examples of games I can think of that meet what I’m talking about are first person. I never played Horizon or Zelda games(past the OG), but for the Witcher 3 and Elden Ring I personally never enjoyed them- despite genuinely trying, mainly because of the style of combat(an actually Bethesda games give you much more choice, but also more clunkiness in that) but also because of imo a lack of engaging freedom(or psuedochoice) in dialogue. Although, Witcher is definitely closer, but Elden Ring felt like an RPG only in that you had stats. Fallout: NV was not fun because of the stats, Fallout: NV was fun because it felt like you could immerse yourself and engage with a living world in a way that actually felt somewhat free. There’s a reason there are so many Youtube videos with premises like “playing Skyrim as chef” or whatever, it is fun to build your own stories, with your own character, in a world that it feels like they can genuinely interact with. FROM Soft games I think intentionally make you feel detached from the world, and the Witcher has you following the story of an existing character. The interaction and choice in Bethesda games is definitely often shallow, but at least it exists.
I haven’t played it but if that stuff is what you’re looking for I think baldurs gate 3 might be for you.
I’ve never really felt like the dialogue choices in any Bethesda game save maybe new vegas (which I don’t even think was technically a Bethesda game) had a lot of real impact on the game. In Skyrim I think there were maybe a handful of times that it mattered. Most times in those types of games I wind up exercising the entire dialogue tree because usually it lets you, and sometimes that’s the only way to get some side quest or whatever.
The combat in Bethesda games save some of the Fallout series is actually pretty bad IMO. In Skyrim, the combat doesn’t feel like combat at all and feels more like two characters swiping air near each other.
The thing that’s the most disappointing about most of these games to me is the squandered potential. At first there feels like there’s depth there, and if you try to get there it is shown to be a facade.
They have a lot of breadth to their games but IMO they’re as deep as a puddle.
I love that steam reviews can make companies take notice and is harder to shove away compared to other types of reviews with how it’s always there on the store page.
I’d love to hear why, personally. Wasn’t a huge fan of Alan Wake 1, so the huge outcry for the sequel has been a bit odd for me, and would like to hear the other side of the coin.
Hmm, I haven’t played it. I avoid everything epic store stuff (even though I would have gotten it for free, since I’m childhood friends with one of the devs). So I’m curious, what’s the problem? I’ve heard like three people say that it’s their game of the year already, so I’m curious what’s the issue for you?
It was a heart warming situation when I saw Blizzard’s game get mixed reviews. They didn’t release games anywhere else until now and getting a reality check was a much needed thing for them.
I disagree purely on the point that what Starfield is, more than anything else, an amazing platform to make a mod on. Not a great game per se, but the setting and overall theme leave a lot of room for Bethesda to cash in on the work of others as is tradition.
For me it was super boring until I left Constellation, fun for 10 or so hours after that, super boring for a few more, and now I haven’t played it in over 2 months.
I actually just peaced out of constellation right away because I felt like the reason I was there was bullshit. I had 30 hours of fun doing side quests, came back to constellation because I heard there were powers I was missing. Acquiring them was tedious and they weren’t even that useful. I grinded out the main story and quit once I got the credit roll. Zero desire to go through it again
Management response: Dear customer, thank you for taking the time to try our cake. This is a cake, which is sweet and tasty by definition. We made the cake so customers can enjoy the cake and taste the typical cake ingredients which taste sweet and tasty. The cake experience as we created should appeal to everyone because cake is tasty.
This doesn’t read soulless corporation to me. This reads Todd Howard’s bruised ego. He’s one of the directors of the whole studio after all, and could very well be behind this decision.
Starfield frustrates me, because in many ways its a major step in the right direction. It has much better roleplaying mechanics than Skyrim or Fallout 4, but at the same time the lore is half-baked and the skill system is fairly weak. It has great potential, but a lot of it feels toned down and less “real” because of it. Space exploration has a lot of potential as well, but setting every objective so far apart on planets ruins exploration by filling it with monotonous procgen.
That’s why I’m fairly confident that once properly patched, and mods/DLCs are in full swing, it will probably be remembered very fondly despite the release state. It’ll pull a Cyberpunk.
I think everything you said here is spot on except the idea Starfield will improve pike Cyberpunk at this point because Bethesda’s attitude really doesn’t indicate that they seem to admit anything needs fixing.
With that said I doubt many people expected Cyberpunk to do as well later on so you are probably right and I hope you are for the game and genre. I really like the aesthetic of Starfield and want it to succeed.
I’m just so tired of getting such half baked stuff at release.
One annoying thing about the “make your own stories” concept is that content us going to be recycled. My followers don’t say anything new or have new things to do etc because it’s all baked in but also on this supposedly open RPG landscape.
I would agree with you if Bethesda games haven’t always been saved by modders, rather than Beth themselves. If we had to depend on Beth to fix their own game, Skyrim would’ve been abandoned long, long, long ago, same with Fallout 4.
Yeah, Bethesda games have always been… playable, I guess, but hardly any good, without modding, at least as far back as Oblivion. Morrowind was the last game they made that was just good, out of the box, without needing mods.
So I figured in a year or two Starfield will be good, with mods, just like Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 were all bland at best on release, until mods made them good.
100% I actually think Starfield has the best bones, even if it has the worst meat, so to speak, so adding meat gives it a much higher ceiling in a few years time.
That’s true and what worries me the most after wanting Starfield to do good. I’ve been playing Starfield for a bit only to find myself moving to Cyberpunk sooner than later lately.
I hope it does and I think it will but again with the reliance Bethesda puts on the community I’m nervous.
Anyway I’ve gotten much of the way through at 100 hours and have enjoyed it - definitely got my money’s worth - but I just sort of hit a wall. To be fair you’ll do that with most games but it seems like Stanfield is just bland.
The problem is that starfield is modern warfare III of Bethesda but people trying to see it as next skyrim, Bethesda ai generated almost all this game and looped it in roguelite shape, the only things evolved is mechanics as you’ve said yourself, and again as you’ve said yourself, this game will be saved by modders
Oh I’m anti-Bethesda and Bethesda practices, I’m just sure it will eventually be a great game once the community steps in and fixes it. It isn’t an excuse for Bethesda, but rather admiration for the modding community, and an example of why FOSS and a rejection of the profit motive is so good.
i dont know why people shit on bethesda for “letting modders fix the game”
i dont really know any other developer that embraces the modding community as much as bethesda does, and i wish other games had the same amount of modding capability that bethesda games do
I think it’s fully possible to criticize Bethesda’s incomplete and highly flawed game design and praise their willingness to support the modding community with great tools at the same time.
The world is now full of technology that used to have real names, but is now called AI so that investors spunk themselves as they high five each other in shareholder meetings.
I miss Games like Starbound. So much to see and do. Unbelievable good atmospheric Music under a Sky full of Stars while building you first Base. This was one, if not the, first game to give me a feeling of smallness in comparison to the Universe.
I also loved starbound. My problem was the late game became very gamey, with the linear planet tier progression to get better materials. Once I got past the progression and beat the final boss there was nothing fun left to do, even with all the base building stuff they put in.
I really enjoyed these “Space-Dungeons” where you could Upgrade your Weapons at the End or get a Terraforming Device for an Emerald-Forrest Biome or something like that.
I have played most of the fully 3D Bethesda RPG games and I am accustomed to their game design, bugs, and janks.
But the only thing I hate about Starfield is just the way the game always talks about how amazing exploration of the unknown is (heck, your main character is even a part of the explorer group name Constellation) while trying everything it can to stop player to do just that (overly rely on teleportation, cannot travel seamlessly between planets, etc…)
It feels like you are playing an institute scientist in an fallout game, always stay in your high tech base and only travel using teleportation to the outside world
This is a major turn off for me and there is no way to fix it
Funny thing is, they don’t care. As long as they have fans who will complain but still buy their product at full price… they simply don’t care. This is evident with every product of theirs. Fallout76 had bugs originating from FO4 that were patched by community but were reintroduced in FO76.
Yeah it’s quite an accomplishment to make the vastness of space feel claustrophobic and small.
Some of the response to the reviews is bizarre - one seems to try to claim that the planets are not boring because they’re realistic and the real world is boring, and that the player is probably just overwhelmed by the awesomeness of it all.
It almost feels like the game Devs have convinced themselves that they’ve been working on the greatest game ever made and when told “no you haven’t” they’re responding by saying “you just don’t get our vision”.
It’s an ok game. I’m actually less bothered by the loading screens and more by the old fashioned story telling. This game would have been amazing if released closer after Skyrim. But it’s been 12 years and we’ve had Witcher 3, Cyberpunk and Baldurs Gate 3 that have changed expectations. All of them are better at evoking a sense of emotional engagement with the game, and actions having meaningful consequences in the plot. Subplots like the bloody baron in Witcher 3, or Judy in cyberpunk have stuck with me in a way characters and events in Skyrim and now Starfield just never have.
Problem is I suspect Bethesda will focus on all the loading screen / sense of scale complaints and not register the more important (imo) issues with the stories, characters and gameplay. Less but better is the real lesson I think.
100%. The best part of Bethesda open world games is exploring the open space between towns, quests, objectives, etc. Fast travel is an option, but rarely necessary. If you rely on it you will miss lots of cool stuff.
Not so in Starfield, the space between objectives is literally empty space.
And space travel isnt actually a fun adventure, but the point of a video game is to romanticize the concepts. Not make them as boring and realistic as possible
There’s lots of actual stuff in interplanetary space that you can pull on for inspiration on how to make an interesting game.
You can have counters with shady trader types that are only in the vast gulf between the systems, there could be rogue planets with billion year old abandoned cities to explore filled with automated defences for you to fight and interesting loot at the end. Distant ancient asteroids that contain the seeds of the first life in the universe that when you interact with temporarily give you status change that you can only get from asteroids and temporarily gives you super strength or something, allowing you to complete missions in a way you otherwise would not necessarily have done.
The way these kind of side quests are supposed to work is the player is plodding along trying to get from point A to point B and on the way they get sidetracked by this side quest (the clue is in the name Bethesda). Maybe it changes their priorities or how they’re going to tackle and upcoming mission. Side quests are not supposed to be independent standalone things, they’re supposed to integrate with the main story. They’re not supposed to be something you find easily there’s supposed to be something you come across on your own as you’re exploring the environment, but you can only do that if the developers bothered to provided environment for you to explore. If they just teleport you to your destination then there’s no opportunity for this kind of emergent gameplay.
Loads of stuff you can put between the star systems.
I agree. Unless that’s the whole point of the game you are making, and then it’s just the nature of the game. Flight Sim is one of my friend’s favorite games, but not so for me. At least they aren’t telling people that they are wrong about it being boring because it’s realistic and realism is better or some crap.
There is, in fact, a very heated debate on whether or not simulators that stay true to form are actually games. With the argument being, they are either toys or simulators.
“I had fun playing with it” isnt exclusive to games, as a ball is not a game but I would gladly throw it against a wall for hours by myself with some music.
But lots of people would likely shit on an attempt to rebrand those things as “video toys” when the distinction is largely only relevant to people studying design, so the heated debate is mostly between academics and pedants.
That’s a fair opinion to have, but my preference is actually exploring the towns. I love that Starfield removed many of the middle of nowhere winding dungeons that I got so bored of. (Dwemer/Nord ruins in Skyrim and office buildings/other skyscrapers in fallout 4.)
I’m not saying it to justify it, I’m saying that not having loading screens doesn’t make No Man’s Sky a better game. I think Star Citizen is a better comparison to Star Field in terms of style- and is much more empty.
Except they don’t really? And I didn’t see that much. Starfield to me seemed like it was being advertised as for RPG fans, and that they would have a lot of dialogue. And that space was just a setting, not the main character.
No man sky also barely has a story and has zero voice acting. It’s apples and oranges, just because they’re both fruit doesn’t mean they can be compared
It’s relevant because it’s there. If you don’t play those parts it doesn’t mean it’s there. They put the time in other things more important to the game than transitions.
Also, the engine is completely different.
If you don’t like Bethesda games just come out and say it. Those are two games that provide completely different experiences to anything Bethesda has ever made.
Do I wish Starfield had less loading screens? Sure, but the only thing I’m really upset about is that it doesn’t show the ship animations every time I take off and land. But that’s an immersion issue and Starfield is more immersive than either nms or cyberpunk either way.
As far as technical issues go, I couldn’t play it when I had popOS installed but since I switched to Windows I’ve had zero issues on a 3080ti
Except you just compared them in saying they are both fruit. In fact, saying they are both fruit is finding a commonality between them when comparing. There are many metrics on which Apples and Oranges can be compared. They are different colors, have a different internal structures, and different juice content. These are negatively correlated comparisons. More positive correlations would be that they are both roughly spherical, provide vitamin C, and grow on trees.
I have always hated that expression. You can compare anything since comparison is just the act of identifying similarities and differences (positive and negative correlations). One can make meaningful comparisons between and apple and a suspension bridge if the situation calls for it.
To anyone who might care, you can identify an apple as a low-quality orange, but that doesn’t also mean the apple is a low-quality apple; they’re optimized to different ends. That is, I think, the point of the expression.
But, if we’re trying to evaluate them on something like taste, which is entirely subjective, yeah, I’m comparing those shits. And, I’m going oranges all the way.
You shouldn’t compare apples and oranges because they are both great but for different reasons and purposes. It isn’t anti-intellectual to recognize that apples are way better for pies than oranges are but if you want some amazing juice and don’t want to go through a whole process to make it good; oranges are the way to go.
This and the many other examples I didn’t want to fill this page with are the reason why it’s a saying. It’s much faster than prefacing what exactly said apples and oranges are going to be used for before giving a real answer and I personally feel it shouldn’t at all be taken literally.
While I don’t disagree with you in spirit, the use case for most instances of the expression are to dissuade the act of comparison at all because the two quantities are so dissimilar that the correlations are irrelevant.
It is an anti-intellectual statement because it presupposes that the person doing the comparing is not able to distinguish between meaningful comparisons and ones which are irrational but support their argument. It ranks up there with “big words” as far as I am concerned, saying more about the person they are being said by rather than the person they are being said to.
“Engines” are not static things. What we call “Unreal Engine” goes back to the 90s.
These comments always bug me as a programmer because it’s like someone calling a 2023 Camero old because it doesn’t have the acceleration of a 2023 Mustang… The “age” almost certainly isn’t the problem, it’s where the effort has or hasn’t been put in to the engine and more importantly the game itself (e.g., carrying on the metaphor, the Camero might be slower getting up to speed because all the R&D for the last 3 years was on a smooth ride).
Bethesda revealed in June 2021 that they were working on a new iteration of the engine called Creation Engine 2, and that it would power their upcoming games Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI. Creation Engine 2 features real-time global illumination and advanced volumetric lighting.
Just slapping number 2 at the end doesn’t mean it’s better. That’s like how Microsoft made Edge browser by forking IE11 and it’s suppose to be better. And how big of a joke is volumetric lighting and “real-time global illumination”… hahaha. Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.
Creation Engine is static. Others, you are right, change.
Points out it does change.
jUst sLappInG a nUmbeR 2 aT tHe End dOesN’t mEan iT’s bEtTer
That’s like how Microsoft made Edge browser by forking IE11 and it’s suppose to be better.
It is… By a lot, ask any web developer. Even before they switched to using Blink under the hood it was a significantly better browser. Now it’s literally a reskinned Chrome. Meanwhile IE11 is a complete mess that requires a ton of hacks to get it to do what you want.
In both cases IE -> Edge and Edge -> Chrome Microsoft changed the literal browser engine. … This just kinda makes my point even more so, the general public has no idea what constitutes an “engine change” and can’t judge whether that will yield the results they want.
Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.
You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right…? Destiny 2 only allows certain areas to have the flashlight on because if they don’t plan for it the flash lights can tank their frame rates (seriously) – but hey “Left 4 Dead 2 had a flashlight in source engine!” /s.
I can almost guarantee Half-Life two also didn’t have “Global illumination”, maybe real time lighting for the flashlight, but Global Illumination is a much bigger thing.
In case you haven’t figured it out, it’s a joke that their engine doesn’t change. Whether they want it or not, they have to at least adapt some things and am well aware of that. Joke is that they do so seldomly and we don’t see much progress in quality.
By a lot, ask any web developer.
I am a web developer and have been for 20 years almost. So I know what am talking about. I know IE, whether I like it or not, so intimately I can still quote all the bugs they had from IE6 onwards. All Edge did, was drop legacy compatibility mode, nothing else. Underlying Trident engine got a minor bump. Hence why I quoted it. But by all means please enlighten me with your Google skills in order to justify the fact Bethesda scammed you out of your money once again.
You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right
Yes, and number of polygons means nothing. Which is why there’s an ongoing joke about people needing to upgrade their computers to run Starfield, when there are better looking games out there which run much much better.
And you are equating global illumination with ray tracing, which is not the same thing. You can do partial global illumination without doing ray tracing. Only thing that means, coming from Todd Howard’s mouth is that they are not using baked in lights, which I don’t believe him either. Remember how FO76 had 16x the details? But in reality they copy and pasted foliage that many times and called it a day with same shitty textures. Yeah, that kind of Todd treatment is expected whatever he says. Even if they did do ray tracing it doesn’t matter one bit if game is boring, which it is.
Also, I gave HL2 and Source engine as an example as a joke as well, since game looked awesome and ran on pretty much any hardware. With the release of Lost Coast, which is what you should be comparing Starfield to, it was demonstrated what Source can do. Lost Coast was released in 2005 and looks significantly better and demonstrates many things Bethesda these days boasts about.
In the end, if all that matters to you is what Todd tells people and then pretends he didn’t and number of polygons so be it. I on the other hand like my games to be entertaining, regardless of how they look.
Initial public release of Microsoft Edge. Contains improvements to performance, support for HTML5 and CSS3.
“Minor bump” that fixed 4,000 bugs, and added HTML5 and CSS3.
I suppose ES6, C++11, Java 8, Python 3, etc are also just “minor bumps.”
I didn’t even buy the game, it didn’t seem interesting to me. I just am frustrated by the fundamental lack of understanding about what an “engine” is and the fact that they’re almost always being iterated on in different ways.
Diversity of engines is a good thing, everything shouldn’t be Unreal Engine, Blink, V8, Clang, etc
Yeah to be honest what strikes me the most about companies like Bethesda is just how little they’ve improved over the decades. There’s nothing stopping them from making major improvements like removing loading screens, adding vehicles finally (I wonder if the ships are really a hat like the train in fallout 3), fixing the buggy ass collisions and physics, or any number of dumb shits they just keep leaving in game after game. It really speaks to the institutional inertia and spaghetti mess their code must be.
I would assume those things are just not prioritized by management because they’ve never been things that have caused sufficient outrage and/or aren’t seen as things that can increase sales… You can’t exactly use “look we fixed physics” in a marketing video to sell a new game. Maybe you can use “look we have vehicles”… but what’s the number of people that will really care? What % will that increase sales?
e.g. maybe someone would care if EA made your need for speed character able to get out of the car and walk around… Do I care? Nah.
(I bothered to look at the Wikipedia page and) they added multiplayer support to Creation Engine for Fallout 76, that was a huge undertaking.
I mean fixing these things can definitely increase sales, but you’re right not in the sense that they are directly marketable. The thing that makes games really blow up is word of mouth, people recommending them to their friends, and you get that best by making a game with overall quality. It’s basically a given at this point that Bethesda games are buggy messes that get fixed by modders. Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less. All of this hurts sales, if not today in the future. So yeah, they probably aren’t prioritized by management, but management is wrong. They often are.
Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less.
These aren’t the improvements you said you wanted ;) Fixing physics, adding vehicles, etc are features/major changes that can increase instability/take a lot more time to QA.
Honestly, this behavior of responding to player feedback and arguing about how “it’s just because you didn’t play the game right!” is kinda unhinged.
It also, to me, really takes Bethesda’s mask off and reveals what their culture must be as a company. Based on these responses, they seem so convinced that they shit gold that they’ve stopped entertaining feedback or trying to innovate much in their games much at all. Kinda confirms some of the criticism I’ve seen of them since Fallout 4 and 76 came out.
It seems to me like someone in the PR department decided they needed to “try something new,” and then didn’t actually run the idea by anyone who could say this is a stupid plan. Someone on the community management team got a promotion and thought it was time to make a bold move, and they were absolutely wrong.
Corporate speak incentivizes bland language. Standing up for as little as possible brings as few enemies as possible, after all. Unfortunately, an empty, bland proposal can only result in empty, bland art.
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Bethesda games are always boring trash. The real game won’t even appear for another year or two at least (after the modders have finished fixing all the bugs, the horrible writing, the design flaws).
Compared to the average game? I don’t agree. Compared to entirely exceptional games like Fallout: NV, yeah. But you don’t have many options if you enjoy open world fps RPGs, and Bethesda games are sometimes the only passable option. I mean, I’d take Starfield over Elden Ring any day, because of personal preference, not because it’s a better game- but my own preference means I also couldn’t say it’s a worse game.
This is only true if it’s literally true that it has to be “first person”. There are, in my opinion, way too many 3rd person semi-RPGs with a vast, open world that are very similar to Bethesda games. It has gotten to the point with me where there are only so many games like this I’ll even play, because they’re huge time drains and they come across as basically the same game with a different skin or setting.
With the “charm” of Bethesda game(that I don’t really know how exactly to describe) the only other recent games I can think of are Outer Worlds and Cyberpunk.
I think that may be right for first person only, but many games that are largely played in third person fit the bill to me: Witcher 3, Elden Ring, Horizon, and even the latest Zelda games to an extent.
I know I’m leaving many other titles out here too, I’m just listing ones I’ve personally played.
No Man’s Sky is even close to being on the list IMO but it’s not quite RPG enough to fit in the same category.
Players are really kinda spoiled for choice when it comes to large, open world games with quasi RPG elements.
I’ve personally grown kinda sick of the genre.
There’s standouts of course (I actually think all the ones I listed are pretty excellent), but all of them require hundreds of hours to complete and I’m just sick of the same game type after a while.
It’s not so much about the first personness of it. It is just that the only examples of games I can think of that meet what I’m talking about are first person. I never played Horizon or Zelda games(past the OG), but for the Witcher 3 and Elden Ring I personally never enjoyed them- despite genuinely trying, mainly because of the style of combat(an actually Bethesda games give you much more choice, but also more clunkiness in that) but also because of imo a lack of engaging freedom(or psuedochoice) in dialogue. Although, Witcher is definitely closer, but Elden Ring felt like an RPG only in that you had stats. Fallout: NV was not fun because of the stats, Fallout: NV was fun because it felt like you could immerse yourself and engage with a living world in a way that actually felt somewhat free. There’s a reason there are so many Youtube videos with premises like “playing Skyrim as chef” or whatever, it is fun to build your own stories, with your own character, in a world that it feels like they can genuinely interact with. FROM Soft games I think intentionally make you feel detached from the world, and the Witcher has you following the story of an existing character. The interaction and choice in Bethesda games is definitely often shallow, but at least it exists.
I haven’t played it but if that stuff is what you’re looking for I think baldurs gate 3 might be for you.
I’ve never really felt like the dialogue choices in any Bethesda game save maybe new vegas (which I don’t even think was technically a Bethesda game) had a lot of real impact on the game. In Skyrim I think there were maybe a handful of times that it mattered. Most times in those types of games I wind up exercising the entire dialogue tree because usually it lets you, and sometimes that’s the only way to get some side quest or whatever.
The combat in Bethesda games save some of the Fallout series is actually pretty bad IMO. In Skyrim, the combat doesn’t feel like combat at all and feels more like two characters swiping air near each other.
The thing that’s the most disappointing about most of these games to me is the squandered potential. At first there feels like there’s depth there, and if you try to get there it is shown to be a facade.
They have a lot of breadth to their games but IMO they’re as deep as a puddle.
I love that steam reviews can make companies take notice and is harder to shove away compared to other types of reviews with how it’s always there on the store page.
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I’d love to hear why, personally. Wasn’t a huge fan of Alan Wake 1, so the huge outcry for the sequel has been a bit odd for me, and would like to hear the other side of the coin.
Hmm, I haven’t played it. I avoid everything epic store stuff (even though I would have gotten it for free, since I’m childhood friends with one of the devs). So I’m curious, what’s the problem? I’ve heard like three people say that it’s their game of the year already, so I’m curious what’s the issue for you?
It was a heart warming situation when I saw Blizzard’s game get mixed reviews. They didn’t release games anywhere else until now and getting a reality check was a much needed thing for them.
You can reply to reviews on Steam???
Yeah? There’s a comment section and developers comments get highlighted on the store page. As far as I know it’s been like this for many years.
Yeah that’s how developers respond to negative reviews or problems that their players have.
Cool, so I’ll wait to pick this game up until it’s $10 on a steam sale in 5 years, and play the community’s modded version.
I’m not sure the game is popular enough to get quite the modding support of the community like previous Bethesda games.
I disagree purely on the point that what Starfield is, more than anything else, an amazing platform to make a mod on. Not a great game per se, but the setting and overall theme leave a lot of room for Bethesda to cash in on the work of others as is tradition.
Starfield was super fun until it wasn’t. I have no desire to ever go back to it. Skyrim on the other hand…
For me it was super boring until I left Constellation, fun for 10 or so hours after that, super boring for a few more, and now I haven’t played it in over 2 months.
I actually just peaced out of constellation right away because I felt like the reason I was there was bullshit. I had 30 hours of fun doing side quests, came back to constellation because I heard there were powers I was missing. Acquiring them was tedious and they weren’t even that useful. I grinded out the main story and quit once I got the credit roll. Zero desire to go through it again
Do you think to an extent it’s just familiarity? It is relaxing for you to go back to something you’re so familiar with, you aren’t surprised by it.
You got downvoted, but yes, and mods. Starfield will be looked at a lot more favorably when everyone is playing a modded version of the game.
Customer: I didn’t like the taste of this cake.
Management response: Dear customer, thank you for taking the time to try our cake. This is a cake, which is sweet and tasty by definition. We made the cake so customers can enjoy the cake and taste the typical cake ingredients which taste sweet and tasty. The cake experience as we created should appeal to everyone because cake is tasty.
Customer: Wtf, it tastes like wet socks!
Management: Cake
It’s the most* realist immersive cake you’ll ever find.
16x the detail.
Now with optional toppings. Plate included in the deluxe cake edition available for limited time only!
collectors edition plate has been replaced with cardboard
The cake is a lie
This was a triumph.
Customer: Hey there, customer outreach person; how does it feel to repeat yourself over and over again?
Management response: As a large-language model, I am unable to experience feelings the way humans do. Moreover…
You’re enjoying the cake wrong, it’s supposed to taste like shit
Just wait until some suckers make you a better cake for free.
Our survey of shit-enjoying-customers proves that more than 99% of them like our cake.
I blame other cake makers for making good cakes and setting unrealistic expectations for cake making.
Hey surprise surprise a soulless corporation does soulless corporation things.
This doesn’t read soulless corporation to me. This reads Todd Howard’s bruised ego. He’s one of the directors of the whole studio after all, and could very well be behind this decision.
Starfield frustrates me, because in many ways its a major step in the right direction. It has much better roleplaying mechanics than Skyrim or Fallout 4, but at the same time the lore is half-baked and the skill system is fairly weak. It has great potential, but a lot of it feels toned down and less “real” because of it. Space exploration has a lot of potential as well, but setting every objective so far apart on planets ruins exploration by filling it with monotonous procgen.
That’s why I’m fairly confident that once properly patched, and mods/DLCs are in full swing, it will probably be remembered very fondly despite the release state. It’ll pull a Cyberpunk.
When players are tired of paying to be game testers then things will change. Until then, go mine some ore or whatever, I haven’t played it.
-Bethesda, maybe
I think everything you said here is spot on except the idea Starfield will improve pike Cyberpunk at this point because Bethesda’s attitude really doesn’t indicate that they seem to admit anything needs fixing.
With that said I doubt many people expected Cyberpunk to do as well later on so you are probably right and I hope you are for the game and genre. I really like the aesthetic of Starfield and want it to succeed.
I’m just so tired of getting such half baked stuff at release.
One annoying thing about the “make your own stories” concept is that content us going to be recycled. My followers don’t say anything new or have new things to do etc because it’s all baked in but also on this supposedly open RPG landscape.
I would agree with you if Bethesda games haven’t always been saved by modders, rather than Beth themselves. If we had to depend on Beth to fix their own game, Skyrim would’ve been abandoned long, long, long ago, same with Fallout 4.
Yeah, Bethesda games have always been… playable, I guess, but hardly any good, without modding, at least as far back as Oblivion. Morrowind was the last game they made that was just good, out of the box, without needing mods.
So I figured in a year or two Starfield will be good, with mods, just like Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 were all bland at best on release, until mods made them good.
100% I actually think Starfield has the best bones, even if it has the worst meat, so to speak, so adding meat gives it a much higher ceiling in a few years time.
That’s true and what worries me the most after wanting Starfield to do good. I’ve been playing Starfield for a bit only to find myself moving to Cyberpunk sooner than later lately.
No harm in waiting for Starfield! It will only get better, while Cyberpunk is largely complete. I loved cyberpunk, especially the DLC.
I hope it does and I think it will but again with the reliance Bethesda puts on the community I’m nervous.
Anyway I’ve gotten much of the way through at 100 hours and have enjoyed it - definitely got my money’s worth - but I just sort of hit a wall. To be fair you’ll do that with most games but it seems like Stanfield is just bland.
We’ll certainly see! I trust modders.
The problem is that starfield is modern warfare III of Bethesda but people trying to see it as next skyrim, Bethesda ai generated almost all this game and looped it in roguelite shape, the only things evolved is mechanics as you’ve said yourself, and again as you’ve said yourself, this game will be saved by modders
Oh I’m anti-Bethesda and Bethesda practices, I’m just sure it will eventually be a great game once the community steps in and fixes it. It isn’t an excuse for Bethesda, but rather admiration for the modding community, and an example of why FOSS and a rejection of the profit motive is so good.
i dont know why people shit on bethesda for “letting modders fix the game”
i dont really know any other developer that embraces the modding community as much as bethesda does, and i wish other games had the same amount of modding capability that bethesda games do
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I think it’s fully possible to criticize Bethesda’s incomplete and highly flawed game design and praise their willingness to support the modding community with great tools at the same time.
I agree with you) communities solve everything
Procedural generation is not AI, don’t spew nonsense.
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Procedural generation has existed for many years. There’s nothing AI about it
The world is now full of technology that used to have real names, but is now called AI so that investors spunk themselves as they high five each other in shareholder meetings.
I miss Games like Starbound. So much to see and do. Unbelievable good atmospheric Music under a Sky full of Stars while building you first Base. This was one, if not the, first game to give me a feeling of smallness in comparison to the Universe.
I also loved starbound. My problem was the late game became very gamey, with the linear planet tier progression to get better materials. Once I got past the progression and beat the final boss there was nothing fun left to do, even with all the base building stuff they put in.
I really enjoyed these “Space-Dungeons” where you could Upgrade your Weapons at the End or get a Terraforming Device for an Emerald-Forrest Biome or something like that.
There’s nothing wrong with a game ending at the final boss tbh
Is Starbound really about the bosses, though?
I have played most of the fully 3D Bethesda RPG games and I am accustomed to their game design, bugs, and janks.
But the only thing I hate about Starfield is just the way the game always talks about how amazing exploration of the unknown is (heck, your main character is even a part of the explorer group name Constellation) while trying everything it can to stop player to do just that (overly rely on teleportation, cannot travel seamlessly between planets, etc…)
It feels like you are playing an institute scientist in an fallout game, always stay in your high tech base and only travel using teleportation to the outside world
This is a major turn off for me and there is no way to fix it
I’m actually fine with personally, but what I dislike is that Starfield is too grindy and slow.
Funny thing is, they don’t care. As long as they have fans who will complain but still buy their product at full price… they simply don’t care. This is evident with every product of theirs. Fallout76 had bugs originating from FO4 that were patched by community but were reintroduced in FO76.
Yeah it’s quite an accomplishment to make the vastness of space feel claustrophobic and small.
Some of the response to the reviews is bizarre - one seems to try to claim that the planets are not boring because they’re realistic and the real world is boring, and that the player is probably just overwhelmed by the awesomeness of it all.
It almost feels like the game Devs have convinced themselves that they’ve been working on the greatest game ever made and when told “no you haven’t” they’re responding by saying “you just don’t get our vision”.
It’s an ok game. I’m actually less bothered by the loading screens and more by the old fashioned story telling. This game would have been amazing if released closer after Skyrim. But it’s been 12 years and we’ve had Witcher 3, Cyberpunk and Baldurs Gate 3 that have changed expectations. All of them are better at evoking a sense of emotional engagement with the game, and actions having meaningful consequences in the plot. Subplots like the bloody baron in Witcher 3, or Judy in cyberpunk have stuck with me in a way characters and events in Skyrim and now Starfield just never have.
Problem is I suspect Bethesda will focus on all the loading screen / sense of scale complaints and not register the more important (imo) issues with the stories, characters and gameplay. Less but better is the real lesson I think.
100%. The best part of Bethesda open world games is exploring the open space between towns, quests, objectives, etc. Fast travel is an option, but rarely necessary. If you rely on it you will miss lots of cool stuff.
Not so in Starfield, the space between objectives is literally empty space.
I mean, that’s why it’s called “space”, right? That’s literally what it is.
And space travel isnt actually a fun adventure, but the point of a video game is to romanticize the concepts. Not make them as boring and realistic as possible
There’s lots of actual stuff in interplanetary space that you can pull on for inspiration on how to make an interesting game.
You can have counters with shady trader types that are only in the vast gulf between the systems, there could be rogue planets with billion year old abandoned cities to explore filled with automated defences for you to fight and interesting loot at the end. Distant ancient asteroids that contain the seeds of the first life in the universe that when you interact with temporarily give you status change that you can only get from asteroids and temporarily gives you super strength or something, allowing you to complete missions in a way you otherwise would not necessarily have done.
The way these kind of side quests are supposed to work is the player is plodding along trying to get from point A to point B and on the way they get sidetracked by this side quest (the clue is in the name Bethesda). Maybe it changes their priorities or how they’re going to tackle and upcoming mission. Side quests are not supposed to be independent standalone things, they’re supposed to integrate with the main story. They’re not supposed to be something you find easily there’s supposed to be something you come across on your own as you’re exploring the environment, but you can only do that if the developers bothered to provided environment for you to explore. If they just teleport you to your destination then there’s no opportunity for this kind of emergent gameplay.
Loads of stuff you can put between the star systems.
I agree. Unless that’s the whole point of the game you are making, and then it’s just the nature of the game. Flight Sim is one of my friend’s favorite games, but not so for me. At least they aren’t telling people that they are wrong about it being boring because it’s realistic and realism is better or some crap.
There is, in fact, a very heated debate on whether or not simulators that stay true to form are actually games. With the argument being, they are either toys or simulators.
“I had fun playing with it” isnt exclusive to games, as a ball is not a game but I would gladly throw it against a wall for hours by myself with some music.
But lots of people would likely shit on an attempt to rebrand those things as “video toys” when the distinction is largely only relevant to people studying design, so the heated debate is mostly between academics and pedants.
yes. the point is it doesn’t work well in a video game.
So why are you playing it then?
That’s a fair opinion to have, but my preference is actually exploring the towns. I love that Starfield removed many of the middle of nowhere winding dungeons that I got so bored of. (Dwemer/Nord ruins in Skyrim and office buildings/other skyscrapers in fallout 4.)
oh good, this reminds me I haven’t bothered to leave a negative review yet. let me correct that.
No Man’s Sky has had no loading screens during gameplay, and space to planet transitions on full planets, since what… 2016?
The Creation Engine is just too damn old.
Edit @Dark Arc: You’re right. Creation Engine is just too damn shitty, I guess. I called it “old” because the gameplay feels so antiquated.
They are completely different games though. Watchdogs 2 had less loading screens than Hitman 3, but that doesn’t really mean much to say.
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I’m not saying it to justify it, I’m saying that not having loading screens doesn’t make No Man’s Sky a better game. I think Star Citizen is a better comparison to Star Field in terms of style- and is much more empty.
It makes it better in terms of loading screens.
They are compared because they both are advertised as filling the same niche, of space exploration with emphasis on exploration.
Except they don’t really? And I didn’t see that much. Starfield to me seemed like it was being advertised as for RPG fans, and that they would have a lot of dialogue. And that space was just a setting, not the main character.
No man sky also barely has a story and has zero voice acting. It’s apples and oranges, just because they’re both fruit doesn’t mean they can be compared
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It’s relevant because it’s there. If you don’t play those parts it doesn’t mean it’s there. They put the time in other things more important to the game than transitions. Also, the engine is completely different.
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If you don’t like Bethesda games just come out and say it. Those are two games that provide completely different experiences to anything Bethesda has ever made.
Do I wish Starfield had less loading screens? Sure, but the only thing I’m really upset about is that it doesn’t show the ship animations every time I take off and land. But that’s an immersion issue and Starfield is more immersive than either nms or cyberpunk either way.
As far as technical issues go, I couldn’t play it when I had popOS installed but since I switched to Windows I’ve had zero issues on a 3080ti
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Except you just compared them in saying they are both fruit. In fact, saying they are both fruit is finding a commonality between them when comparing. There are many metrics on which Apples and Oranges can be compared. They are different colors, have a different internal structures, and different juice content. These are negatively correlated comparisons. More positive correlations would be that they are both roughly spherical, provide vitamin C, and grow on trees.
I have always hated that expression. You can compare anything since comparison is just the act of identifying similarities and differences (positive and negative correlations). One can make meaningful comparisons between and apple and a suspension bridge if the situation calls for it.
Ohhh my godd, me too. It’s so anti-intellectual.
To anyone who might care, you can identify an apple as a low-quality orange, but that doesn’t also mean the apple is a low-quality apple; they’re optimized to different ends. That is, I think, the point of the expression.
But, if we’re trying to evaluate them on something like taste, which is entirely subjective, yeah, I’m comparing those shits. And, I’m going oranges all the way.
You shouldn’t compare apples and oranges because they are both great but for different reasons and purposes. It isn’t anti-intellectual to recognize that apples are way better for pies than oranges are but if you want some amazing juice and don’t want to go through a whole process to make it good; oranges are the way to go.
This and the many other examples I didn’t want to fill this page with are the reason why it’s a saying. It’s much faster than prefacing what exactly said apples and oranges are going to be used for before giving a real answer and I personally feel it shouldn’t at all be taken literally.
While I don’t disagree with you in spirit, the use case for most instances of the expression are to dissuade the act of comparison at all because the two quantities are so dissimilar that the correlations are irrelevant.
It is an anti-intellectual statement because it presupposes that the person doing the comparing is not able to distinguish between meaningful comparisons and ones which are irrational but support their argument. It ranks up there with “big words” as far as I am concerned, saying more about the person they are being said by rather than the person they are being said to.
So why not stand on that hill when it’s relevant?
I do. That is a side effect of always standing on the hill. I am there when it matters, but also when it doesn’t. Such is the curse of my superpowers.
Captain Pedant AWAAAAYYYY!
“Engines” are not static things. What we call “Unreal Engine” goes back to the 90s.
These comments always bug me as a programmer because it’s like someone calling a 2023 Camero old because it doesn’t have the acceleration of a 2023 Mustang… The “age” almost certainly isn’t the problem, it’s where the effort has or hasn’t been put in to the engine and more importantly the game itself (e.g., carrying on the metaphor, the Camero might be slower getting up to speed because all the R&D for the last 3 years was on a smooth ride).
Creation Engine is static. Others, you are right, change.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Engine
Case and point
Just slapping number 2 at the end doesn’t mean it’s better. That’s like how Microsoft made Edge browser by forking IE11 and it’s suppose to be better. And how big of a joke is volumetric lighting and “real-time global illumination”… hahaha. Oh my. Source 1 had that when Half-Life2 was released. Advancement.
Here’s an in-game example of that global illumination.
Points out it does change.
It is… By a lot, ask any web developer. Even before they switched to using Blink under the hood it was a significantly better browser. Now it’s literally a reskinned Chrome. Meanwhile IE11 is a complete mess that requires a ton of hacks to get it to do what you want.
In both cases IE -> Edge and Edge -> Chrome Microsoft changed the literal browser engine. … This just kinda makes my point even more so, the general public has no idea what constitutes an “engine change” and can’t judge whether that will yield the results they want.
You’ve seen how low poly Half-Life 2 is right…? Destiny 2 only allows certain areas to have the flashlight on because if they don’t plan for it the flash lights can tank their frame rates (seriously) – but hey “Left 4 Dead 2 had a flashlight in source engine!” /s.
I can almost guarantee Half-Life two also didn’t have “Global illumination”, maybe real time lighting for the flashlight, but Global Illumination is a much bigger thing.
This is Half-Life 2 with global illumination: https://youtu.be/WWYpKRETv8k?si=9eTDmx10m3l9nwdR
Here’s an old forum from 2005 talking about how “real global illumination isn’t yet possible” https://gamedev.net/forums/topic/348797-half-life-2-global-illumination/3282572/
In case you haven’t figured it out, it’s a joke that their engine doesn’t change. Whether they want it or not, they have to at least adapt some things and am well aware of that. Joke is that they do so seldomly and we don’t see much progress in quality.
I am a web developer and have been for 20 years almost. So I know what am talking about. I know IE, whether I like it or not, so intimately I can still quote all the bugs they had from IE6 onwards. All Edge did, was drop legacy compatibility mode, nothing else. Underlying Trident engine got a minor bump. Hence why I quoted it. But by all means please enlighten me with your Google skills in order to justify the fact Bethesda scammed you out of your money once again.
Yes, and number of polygons means nothing. Which is why there’s an ongoing joke about people needing to upgrade their computers to run Starfield, when there are better looking games out there which run much much better.
And you are equating global illumination with ray tracing, which is not the same thing. You can do partial global illumination without doing ray tracing. Only thing that means, coming from Todd Howard’s mouth is that they are not using baked in lights, which I don’t believe him either. Remember how FO76 had 16x the details? But in reality they copy and pasted foliage that many times and called it a day with same shitty textures. Yeah, that kind of Todd treatment is expected whatever he says. Even if they did do ray tracing it doesn’t matter one bit if game is boring, which it is.
Also, I gave HL2 and Source engine as an example as a joke as well, since game looked awesome and ran on pretty much any hardware. With the release of Lost Coast, which is what you should be comparing Starfield to, it was demonstrated what Source can do. Lost Coast was released in 2005 and looks significantly better and demonstrates many things Bethesda these days boasts about.
In the end, if all that matters to you is what Todd tells people and then pretends he didn’t and number of polygons so be it. I on the other hand like my games to be entertaining, regardless of how they look.
Really? So Chakra was just a fever dream I had? (https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-edge-gets-better-against-chrome-and-other-browsers-javascript-benchmarks)
“Minor bump” that fixed 4,000 bugs, and added HTML5 and CSS3.
I suppose ES6, C++11, Java 8, Python 3, etc are also just “minor bumps.”
I didn’t even buy the game, it didn’t seem interesting to me. I just am frustrated by the fundamental lack of understanding about what an “engine” is and the fact that they’re almost always being iterated on in different ways.
Diversity of engines is a good thing, everything shouldn’t be Unreal Engine, Blink, V8, Clang, etc
Case in point
Huh, thanks for the tip!
Casing point
That’s true, but the comments are valid when talking about Bethesda games
Yeah to be honest what strikes me the most about companies like Bethesda is just how little they’ve improved over the decades. There’s nothing stopping them from making major improvements like removing loading screens, adding vehicles finally (I wonder if the ships are really a hat like the train in fallout 3), fixing the buggy ass collisions and physics, or any number of dumb shits they just keep leaving in game after game. It really speaks to the institutional inertia and spaghetti mess their code must be.
I would assume those things are just not prioritized by management because they’ve never been things that have caused sufficient outrage and/or aren’t seen as things that can increase sales… You can’t exactly use “look we fixed physics” in a marketing video to sell a new game. Maybe you can use “look we have vehicles”… but what’s the number of people that will really care? What % will that increase sales?
e.g. maybe someone would care if EA made your need for speed character able to get out of the car and walk around… Do I care? Nah.
(I bothered to look at the Wikipedia page and) they added multiplayer support to Creation Engine for Fallout 76, that was a huge undertaking.
I mean fixing these things can definitely increase sales, but you’re right not in the sense that they are directly marketable. The thing that makes games really blow up is word of mouth, people recommending them to their friends, and you get that best by making a game with overall quality. It’s basically a given at this point that Bethesda games are buggy messes that get fixed by modders. Every time you have a major bug, game crash, or save corruption it takes you out of the world and forces you to remember you’re playing a game that barely works, which makes you like it less. All of this hurts sales, if not today in the future. So yeah, they probably aren’t prioritized by management, but management is wrong. They often are.
Fair assessment, though I’d critique:
These aren’t the improvements you said you wanted ;) Fixing physics, adding vehicles, etc are features/major changes that can increase instability/take a lot more time to QA.
Good job, guys, I’m sure that’ll fix it.
Fuck. I mean I even liked Starfield but this level of mishandling the public perception is absolutely unreal.
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Honestly, this behavior of responding to player feedback and arguing about how “it’s just because you didn’t play the game right!” is kinda unhinged.
It also, to me, really takes Bethesda’s mask off and reveals what their culture must be as a company. Based on these responses, they seem so convinced that they shit gold that they’ve stopped entertaining feedback or trying to innovate much in their games much at all. Kinda confirms some of the criticism I’ve seen of them since Fallout 4 and 76 came out.
Part of me believes this was triggered by them only getting one nomination in The Game Awards.
They botched it on a lot of fronts. Them not getting a nom makes sense to me.
It seems to me like someone in the PR department decided they needed to “try something new,” and then didn’t actually run the idea by anyone who could say this is a stupid plan. Someone on the community management team got a promotion and thought it was time to make a bold move, and they were absolutely wrong.
Looks like Bethesda discovered ChatGPT.
Some of those replies are as bland, hunky-dory and sanitized as can be, with a dash of “you’re playing it wrong”.
Corporate speak incentivizes bland language. Standing up for as little as possible brings as few enemies as possible, after all. Unfortunately, an empty, bland proposal can only result in empty, bland art.
The failure is absolutely deserved