It keeps getting mentioned because it’s the new Bethesda game (also its kind of a big deal being their first new IP in, what, 20 years?), it hasn’t been even a year since it dropped (so it’s still fresh to people), and it has more content coming. And because every new update will stir the old users again and bring a new wave of users that will also keep mentioning its improvements and its flaws.
And i mean, even aside from that, Oblivion and Morrowind still get mentioned to this day (in both good ways and bad), and they’re much older. Same’s going to happen to Starfield. It’s just the way it is.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m not even saying it sucks really, to me it’s just not super compelling so far. End of story. Not gonna talk about it anymore. And I’ve decided after this thread that Starfield is going in my Lemmy content filter. I don’t care in the least how much people hate it so I don’t need to read about it every 4 days.
No. It’s got nothing to do with “Haters being Haters”. The camel’s back just finally broke.
Frankly, it’s something that I’m surprised didn’t happen sooner. People got tired of excusing Bethesda’s many blunders since they joined Microsoft (because after that, they should have no excuse for mediocre…anything, especially on the technical side) Bethesda also got too used to people giving them a pass and going “oh, silly Bethesda!” when they saw a severe bug or just bad/mediocre mechanics, where if it was anyone else, they’d be rightfully upset that they paid fully AAA price and the game was a broken, bug filled mess (sometimes with bugs that date back to Morrowind, at that), and is finally feeling that burn others normally get. It was cute (apparently) in 2006 with Oblivion, it’s no longer cute in 2023.
It’s also likely to do with Bethesda’s attitude. Them responding to criticism about some planets being empty and boring to explore with things like “it’s not boring. When Armstrong and the gang landed on the moon IRL, they weren’t bored” or just passive aggresively in general to negative reviews with actual critisms of the game instead of taking the critisim to heart and striving to maybe add some content to them as an update (or DLC, but them charging $70, then asking for more money to fix a problem in the base game would bring em more heat than anything) being some examples.
Or the fact that, instead of fixing severe bugs or optimizing their game, they’re introducing this Creations thing and basically doing what i said in parenthesis above.
I love when people actually critique games, that’s how you get better games. Just refund and leave a non-aggressive negative review, let them know the concerns, blind fans are still going to call ‘hate’, but their claim has no foundation if you are just genuinely being a critic. People really settle for average and ‘rinse and repeat’ games, you can demand more, don’t bend over to these AAA companies.
Seriously though, stop buying games in the first week or two of them releasing, let the dust settle first, they aren’t going anywhere.
Yup. That second bit should be a golden standard, but…honestly? Knowing companies hire psychiatrists and all that jazz that tell them exactly what they need to put out there to get people to buy, install FOMO, hit addicts where it hurts, or just wear them down till they eventually say “yes”, and that its not just for games, it becomes kinda murky for me to just throw all the blame at the people buying. Not saying that people shouldn’t do their do dilagence (and after a while, to learn to ignore said marketing tricks. Fool me once and all that), they absolutely should, just that the other side are also hitting bellow the belt every chance they can in order to make a sale.
Yeah, it’s hard to throw all the blame on people when there’s so many engineered tactics to tempt people to buy stuff, but there’s got to be a point where you realise you don’t really need that special skin for pre-ordering, you won’t even use it and you won’t even be playing the game in a year. I’d like to see more regulations on it all, just to protect the people who struggle to protect themselves from predatory business tactics.
It’s a big release with a life cycle. Big release by the guys who made Skyrim? it’s going to continue to get new people even after it’s life cycle officially ends. So as long as Bethesda keeps digging themselves deeper instead of out the hole they made, the negative reviews and press will keep coming; by these new folks and the current players who see Bethesda basically making the situation worse in order to give any curious buyers a warning to be mindful at what they’re going to throw money at. Do some people sometimes go a bit too scathing in their takes? Sure. But honestly? I’m not gonna blame em. I know a disillusioned person when i see one, and disillusioned or otherwise, they’re still not at all wrong with most of their complaints.
the “hater” thing…yeah, most of these aren’t haters. If they were bringing up BS claims, sure (See: The Pronouns thing). But the majority of “hate” this game is getting is…actual shortcomings the game has, or for the pretty crappy responses the devs put out in response. Dare I say it, most of the “hate” is by actual fans of Bethesda. Again, very disillusioned likely now former fans, but yeah. Haters don’t spend the energy to go this indepth about something, fans passionate about the thing typically do tho.
Like i said in my other comment, the camel’s back broke for a lot of people after 13 long years. Not 5 or 3 years, 13. Even more if you were a Bethesda fan before Skyrim.
I cannot agree with a lot of this, that it’s a justified never ending series of hate waves. I especially cannot agree these are Bethesda fans. Every comment thread typically contains a shitload of vitriol toward them specifically, calling it out by name.
I was a huge fan of Skyrim and fallout 3/4. I bought Starfield, hated the map, found the game kind of interesting but not obsession level compelling, and just haven’t played it much. It couldn’t be less interesting to me to obsessively hate it. There isn’t a way it could be bad enough to talk about over and over. It’s old news. I may pick it up later when I’m bored and get into it, or I may not. Life moves on. I think people need to see it as what it is, a video game, and as such there are much more important things in life. Play the ones you like and be done with it.
Having said all this the hate waves don’t seem to be stopping so I’m simply going to add Starfield to my content filter. Just simply don’t give a shit.
People leave steam reviews when they’ve played a game. There’s no deadline. So why wouldn’t new reviews be coming in? It happens to all games. Why should Starfield be different?
Its getting regular updates. I think every 6 weeks. Each new update will disturb the water, when it either breaks what few mods are out already and someone quits fixing it, or when the update fails to fix/creates a new bug and someone finds that to be too much.
Then a new wave of annoyed people will reignite the conversation.
Youre also going to see each time that more and more people start talking praise on the game. As some people do just like it as is, and as updates repair or add enough things that some people are willing to consider “enough” to undo the previous flaws.
How much of each depends on if those updates are actually ever good, or if theyre lackluster or fail to stick to the called shot schedule.
It couldn’t possibly be the fact that the game is just mid as all fuck, and people are far enough past the honeymoon phase that they’re finally having to accept it.
I think it’s more like “why are they bothering?” Like, usually for these kinds of single-player games, the reviews improve over time because once the nature of the game is well known, new prospective buyers are more likely to be correct about whether they’ll like it or not, so new reviews are mostly from people who self-selected for being likely to enjoy the game.
So either people are getting worse at knowing if they’ll like Starfield before they buy it, or they’re buying it despite knowing they probably won’t like it so they can leave a negative review, or people who bought it at release are going back and reviewing it months later.
There was a narrative it got review bombed I think. So people can get into it thinking it’s not that but it ends up being exactly what they feared.
If there is a game that has mixed reviews, I sometimes still go for it if I feel really interesred. It could just be “hit or miss” thing and I could still love it while some hate it.
This can be people doing the same thing and majority finding out it’s not working for them. Also, there is a sale on Steam, so likely many people got it for themselves, or for Christmas
People are being entitled taint-lickers. It does suck that its optimization is poor, but I’m on a 4 year-old PC build and my CPU was not top-end even then, with a 3070 and I have had zero issues running it. The space travel should be more interesting, they really fucked up by making space piracy basically impossible, so you can’t ever profit by taking the ships of people who actively try to murder you. There’s a lot that could be more engaging, but also the reviews of Elex are mostly positive and it’s one of the worst, most quest-bugged half finished pieces of shit I’ve ever played, with basically nothing going for it beside decent art and a unique story. The game is trash and I wasted way too much time on it. Starfield is vastly better. Not amazing, but solidly OK. Without the social-media circle-jerk, there is no way the reviews would continue to get worse as they continue to address performance issues and fix bugs.
Yes, and Piranha Bytes is small AA German game studio with a staggering 33 people as of 2021 (according to wikipedia) that have always stuck to their lane and made very niche games in the background that are basically only appealling to their audience. They know damn well who they’re aiming at with their stuff too, because they’re not trying to change the formula much as of Elex 2 or grab as much people as possible.
You can compare that to Bethesda (that according to inside sources, wants to act like a AA when they’re acctually AAA in manpower, budget, and project scope), with it’s 450 people on staff and different subsidaries that work together with them as needed, to Piranha Bytes, but that’d be disingenuous as all hell.
Its insane to me that you just compared those two games
If only because a lot of the positive reviews for elex are extremely vocal about the way the game falls flat and fails to give a good experience, and that the thumbs up is because of the knowledge of the devs small size.
There is something to be said for the game to be hyped for YEARS and to come out being much less than what the hype seemed to imply. Running on the old and tired poorly-optimized “not Gamebryo” engine, a bunch of fetch quests punctuated by fast travel “exploration”, and mostly empty procedurally-generated planets bolted in to make Todd Howard’s vision of 1000 planets a hollow reality… all of that can get people feeling pretty underwhelmed with the game.
It isn’t necessarily that Starfield is bad, but that it is not great, and that it continues to be pushed as some amazing experience it isn’t. Sorry Todd, but I’ve been to some of the Wonders of the World before. I’m not going to be in awe of your virtual empty planet and the vastness of space and how beautiful it is through a computer screen. It just doesn’t hit the same way that you want it to, especially in the way most gamers will experience it.
Here’s the kicker, though… some parts of Starfield can become great. Fallout 76 was bad and got better when Wastelanders added NPCs, so it stands to reason they could make some sizable shifts that make the game more enjoyable.
It’s funny. Everyone bitches that there’s no content and the world is bland, and then says “you can fast travel everywhere so there’s nothing in-between nodes.” Maybe, just maybe if people traveled between locations by actually launching into space and walking around in towns they’d run into all the random events that made me take 2 hours to cross the street in some places. Instead everyone just jumps point to point and says “the only thing interesting is the main story.” Is Starfield a GOTY quality game? No. But people sure seem to be going out of their way to play the game in bad faith for a bad review.
Or the developers could have put the story hooks in front of fast travel instead of hiding them? Look at Baldur’s Gate 3 with fast travel nodes. You can pick up several quests just by going to a few nodes. And other quests are found on the logical route to complete story quests. And a few are explorer rewards.
The thing is, this is a game design thing we’ve known for over a decade now. So no, if the quests are easily missable, it’s not the player’s fault for not finding them.
Maybe, just maybe if people traveled between locations by actually launching into space
You are aware that there isn’t anywhere to go while in space, right? You can’t manually fly from Cydonia to Deimos Staryards, nor can you go “beyond” the bounds of the planet cell you’re in. You can’t go from a “Settlement” planetary POI to an “Abandoned Mine” POI that is some 200km away from it without fast travel.
That’s on the game design. If players feel the need to fast travel then they aren’t linking to the side stories to the path of the main game well enough. Spider-man had fast travel, i used it once for the trophy and never touched it again because traversal was so good in the game. Red Dead did it brilliantly too. I’m not sure if fast travel existed or not, I never looked for it. The world was rewarding everywhere.
I personally really enjoyed the trip. Far from perfect, and more a 2010 game in its core, but quite entertaining. However, I would have been disappointed if I had to pay 80€ for it (especially because this game lacks polish). I had no hesitation thanks to the gamepass, and I have no regret playing 100h to it :).
I think the backlash is a bit excessive. It feels like people expected this game to be exceptional, having huge expectations that were never met. It’s Bethesda, how can we expect a master piece from them on day one? Besides, it’s not like a success like Skyrim can be reproduced that easily. It’s not bad to have expectations, but if the game is different than what you had in mind, it’s not the game’s fault imo (and it happens too frequently those years, as if all major releases are bad games that should never be played).
It’s the same people who were sending death threats to CDPR over Cyberpunk. They had built up up an internal hype saying that [insert game] was going to replace their life, and they would have no reason to ever leave their computer again. When that obviously didn’t happen (and it had the some bugs on launch, although not universally game-crashing levels of bugs like Skyrim on launch, which people seem to forget) they decided that they needed to stomp the game into the ground and nobody was allowed to enjoy it ever. Unfortunately the internet is all bandwagon these days and the petulant children have managed to get a cloud of negativity to hang around the game. Talk to some adults about the game and you’ll find that it’s solid enough, with a decent amount of gameplay. Is it worth $100? No, buy it on sale for like 30 or 40, but these people saying you are garbage for not believing that the Bethesda team needs to be lynched over this really need yo take their spoiled heads out of their collective ass.
These are just a few random quotes I found with a minute of Googling but there are many more out there. I think people were expecting exceptional and had huge expectations because Bethesda and Microsoft were very much pushing the hype train a lot. They set up the game as one thing and what was delivered was a pale shadow of it. I agree you can’t expect for the success of Skyrim, but it was 100% presented to the world like it would be. There are many parts of the game that fall short of what Skyrim did 13 years ago and what other Bethesda RPGs were doing decades ago in terms of quest design and dialogue.
“We’ve always wanted to play the game we’re making and no-one else has quite pulled it off in what we’re doing. And we feel that once we started putting some pieces in place and playing parts of it, there’s something really… I don’t want to say too much but… pretty incredible there.”
“It’s very big, yeah. People are still playing Skyrim and we have learned from that. We spent more time building [Starfield] to be played for a long time, if you so chose that you just wanted to keep playing it. It’s got some more hooks in it for that, that we added later to a game like Skyrim… while still making sure that somebody who just wants to play it, and go through the main quests and “win”, or feel they’ve accomplished something large is doable.”
“And it has large scale goals and storytelling, but that minute-to-minute feels rewarding for you. And if you just want to pass the time and go watch the sunset and pick flowers it’s rewarding in that way too. The quiet moments feel really really good.”
Yes, it seems to be it. I personally do not like this way of thinking. Marketing is always going to put up some lies in order to sell the product. It feels strange to me to judge a game from what the marketing said about it, instead of what the game truly is. Of course, it would be very disappointing if you can only rely on what the marketing said when deciding to buy or not buy the game. But with all the options available nowadays (reviews, streams, test it for 10€ thanks to the gamepass instead of paying 80€ directly), it seems strange to me to spend so much money, without informing yourself enough, and be this angry afterwards.
As I said, it’s not like the game is perfect, but it’s far to be as bad as those « user reviews » depicts.
I got Starfield free with my new graphics card and tbh I’m glad that was the case as otherwise I’d have serious buyers remorse. I put a good 50 or so hours into the game, enough to finish the main storyline and most of the factions quests, but at the end of the day it just felt like a hollow experience, and I doubt I’ll be going back to replay it.
The NPCs are shallow and robotic, and once you’ve explored their dialogue tree once you may as well never talk to them again as they’ll never say anything new.
The game worlds look quite visually impressive but aside from the handful of cities and occasional settlements and outposts there is just nothing to do. Who would have guessed simulating a lifeless grey rock would be boring?
The fast travel system is completely broken and ruins the purported objective of the game; to explore. Instead of encouraging the player to do so by landing on planets to find fuel for their ship, the player can just teleport across the galaxy with no consequences.
The only aspect of the game I found to be really fun was the space combat. The ship builder, while quite frustrating at times, was also enjoyable.
Overall, Starfield feels like a game whose ambitions exceed the technical capabilities of the engine it is based on. You can see the janky workarounds that are used to make the game fit the engine from a mile away; cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view, invisible barriers in the world to prevent you from walking too far without reloading, a cut to black when transiting between interiors and exteriors, and the same dull and lifeless NPC “AI” (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.
It’s past time that BGS put the rotting hulk that is Gamebryo/Creation Engine/whatever this latest iteration is called out to pasture (at least for new IPs like this) as clearly it is now actively hindering their creative ambitions.
I mostly agree, but making me land on boring planets to farm for fuel will not improve the game. It’ll just make it more tedious.
Now, if there was a questline to find and repair or create fuel depots in each system, that could actually be fun.
The problem keeps coming back to planets being really boring outside of a few hotspots. If they solved that problem, a lot of the other problems wouldn’t be nearly as noticeable. But instead, they dug in their heels and declared that real astronauts don’t find them boring. And I’m not even sure I believe that. The first steps were very exciting, but after that, it was mostly just anxiety about dying and making sure they prevent that. They’d actually be fighting down the boredom to make sure they didn’t make a stupid mistake out of complacency.
Oh yes, 100% - if they were to implement a fuel system, then just mining for fuel manually on the existing planets would be incredibly dull. Building something like a fuel refinery on the other hand would make sense - it would even give a purpose to habitats/planetary bases, which are completely superfluous at the moment. At no point in the game did I need to build one, and if the game didn’t keep reminding me that base building existed I would probably have forgotten all about that feature.
That’s a tradition going back to Fallout though. Why should you build a base in Fallout 4? Because you can’t advance the game without doing so. Beyond a crafting station it was completely superfluous. I’m not surprised they haven’t figured out how to have it be a natural impulse yet.
I’m not surprised they haven’t figured out how to have it be a natural impulse yet.
They probably have, but decided to not bother, “too much work” involved. I mean, I can easily think of many ways to make outposts something players would look forward to mechanically:
outpost can create a trade route to a city, lowering prices of certain goods there and/or making new goods appear on the vendors. Making this increase vendors’ credit stock alone would make most players create at least one outpost.
remove outpost engineering skill, let the player buy blueprints to learn new stuff AND also allow the player to buy prefab from vendors, or let the player hire a construction crew to build some stuff instead, such that, when you arrive at the outpost, you’ll see their ship and have X of the bought stuff “in stock” to place “for free”
make the research aspect happen in a crewed outpost with a research lab. Let the npc create an activity/side quest asking for the components. Adding to this, let the player buy stuff and ask it to be delivered to an outpost for a fee, or have a new NPC that is basically a space trucker to make deliveries to your outposts.
cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view
Docking is more egregious. It’s not even hiding a loading screen, it’s just wasting our time so things like the CF/SysDef back and forth take longer.
and the same dull and lifeless NPC “AI” (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.
It’s worse IMO, NPCs don’t seem to have schedules anymore. Which is kind of okay, my least favorite thing in Skyrim was shops being closed because there’s no “fast travel and arrive in the morning” option, but they feel a lot less alive when they stand in one place forever.
About lack of schedules, at least for shops, there’s a very easy solution: have a second NPC for the night shift, sharing the same inventory. That way the shop stays open 24h and the npcs can still have some downtime.
i had a lot of fun. i think people just expect too much from this type of game and bethesda. look at no mans sky, i still think its just as boring as when it released but it has gained a great following. people now seem to just assume if a game is made by a AAA team everyone must love it regardless of personal taste. in my opinion that mind set is the reason most AAA get focus grouped to death. im scared that people are going to kill off the type of games i like because everyone acts like its crime to release a game that doesn’t appeal to everyones exact tastes/desires.
i will say though starfield is my least favorite bethesda game.
starfield 7/10
The problem is that the game fell flat even on a lot of basic expectations, especially exploration.
When you first arrive on a new star, you’re automagically orbiting the “most important planet”, if it has one. Without doing anything other than arriving, you already know all the inorganic resources of every planet and moon around that star (you don’t know where, but you already know it’s there without a scan). Not only that, you know which planets have abandoned mines or settlements and where. While flying in orbit, if “nothing happens” in the first 10 seconds, nothing will happen, period. POI in space all have to be fast traveled to.
It manages to be worse than NMS where the parallel is obvious, like in scanning fauna/flora, where you activate the scanner, point and click and call it day. But do it 8 times just to say it’s different.
Shipbuilding is fun, but the fucked that up by locking many parts behind two different skills, Piloting and Starship Design. It really feels like something they did because they couldn’t figure a way to balance the economy around ship prices. They could’ve made it so that you get access to better parts by completing faction missions, that’d give actual reason for the players to do them other than sheer curiosity, but nope, spend precious skill points to get better ship parts!
This game is a pile of bad design decisions on top of more bad design decisions and whether the company is AAA or not is irrelevant. Bad implementation, aka errors and bugs, is a matter of coding. Bad design is a matter of direction, or lack thereof.
i agree that the exploration outside of the main areas is very sparce, but i think its important to cosider thats is what was promised, and the lore backs it up. i liked the hand-crafted areas a lot but outside of those areas tends to feel like NMS with a couple generic things to do every some often. but i still enjoyed building my bases and running in a circle around them destorying all abandon factories with rando baddies i could find.
i agree the fact that they are a AAA studio is irrelevant, but most people do judge things differently when considering this. its too often i see people praising indie games that i eventually try and hate. but i dont freak out and call it terrible, i stop playing. and i see well made AAA games that i greatly enjoy get review bombed for defending there design decisions which were based of what the designers consider fun.
but i dont agree that they made a “pile” of bad decisions. Again i think they were trying to make a fun game and most of the designer probably enjoyed playing it before releasing. but the majority of people who thought bethesda was making “their” dream space shooter didn’t like it so know bethesda is evil for some reason. i liked this game, i will play the dlc, and likely replay it.
I agree that the skill-locked purchase of physical equipment is garbage but I found myself sticking on the question of if you got the ‘de-facto’ best ship part for each category because you had the relevant skill.
Like some quest is occuring and, in dialogue, you have a choice locked by being the most-skilled pilot and choosing it leads to one set of the best ship parts. How does that flow? Does that read as the same thing, or is it more enjoyable now as a reward for character build?
you have a choice locked by being the most-skilled pilot and choosing it leads to one set of the best ship parts. How does that flow?
You got my idea wrong
you get access to better parts by completing faction missions,
I meant that, as a reward for finishing a quest, or series of quests, the ship parts become available. It’s not “choose to get a ship part during the quest”, it’s “complete quest, vendors now sell new stuff”.
For instance, completing mission 4 of the UC Vanguard opens up B class parts because “congratulations, we’re promoting you” or, given how that questline flows, “We’re promoting you because things are getting dangerous and you need access to the extra stuff”. Completing the final mission unlocks C class parts. But those are only at the Deimos Staryards, since they’re the sole contractor for UC. It wouldn’t make sense to complete their questline and also get access to FC’s B and C class ship parts, for that you’d have to complete their Freestar Ranger questline. That’s the idea.
I knew what to expect, and I was still disappointed. I was expecting the constant loading, and the jank, and the shit AI, etc. I was also expecting the world building to be decent, and the quests to be interesting with tons of distractions that keep you coming back. That’s what makes it a disappointment; the actually good things about a Bethesda RPG are totally absent in Starfield. It’s just the mechanics and formula; none of the flair or personality.
If only old school Bethesda fans had warned us of this trend of Bethesda removing the very things that make their games worthwhile for their last four major releases.
Still a 7? Just curious, what made it fun for you? What were the expectations?
Legit curious, as finding a good comment about the game that doesnt sound salty af is far in between.
I found skyrim fun for 60ish hours and than got extremely bored. Never touched it again. Starfield looked like that but barren as hell, which is not what it is sold as. Those are my personal reasons for not touching it though!
Not op but I too give it 6 or 7. I liked the story. I liked shooting things. I liked the dialogue. I liked the base building. Liked the graphics, it was super quick for me on my 4900 xt. But everything was liked. Not loved. It was mediocre in everything. The POI were fun, but there are like 10 that get recycled. I like the planets but they’re also recycled. I like the cities but they’re all the size of a tiny town. It’s fun but it was sold as something grand which undersold it’s promises. First colony outside of earth, biggest civilization, has like a population of 100 if that. They should have sold the entire story as worlds on the rim. Not the hub of humanity.
yeah i would agree with you for the most part. i guess im lucky i ignored the hype after the announcement. i have seen the hype train derail too many times.
well, i thought of it as fallout 4 in space before playing. it has a couple core gameplay changes i liked and a couple i didn’t. it is the slowest paced bethesda game for sure, which is why i think most people call it boring. if you didnt replay skyrim i doubt you would replay this game. i give it a 7/10 for people of my taste and i would consider myself the intended audience. i have played bethesda games since oblivion and average about 200 hours per bethesda game, usually 3 playthroughs seperated by about a year or 2.
for reference here are my top bethesda games:
Fallout: New Vegas - 9/10(obsidian for a major win)
Fallout 3 - 9/10
Oblivion - 9/10
Skyrim - 8/10
Fallout 4 - 8/10
Starfield - 7/10
Fallout 76 - 3/10 - i wish i could enjoy this game
these scores reflect how much i enjoyed each game. but if New Vegas had no technical issues it would be 10/10 for me.
Ye, that makes perfect sense, thanks! From your other scoring, i can see the game isnt that bad, but just average. Even compared to the others, which are rated a lot higher. From this i can also assume id enjoy the game for like 30sh hours, because this isnt 100% my jam. For me that wouldnt be worth the full price, but i can understand for somebody that would put 200h in np it would be worth it :)
People expected a game about exploration. Because it’s a Bethesda game, and because it’s a space bethesda game, and somehow Bethesda managed to make a game that doesn’t really have exploration in it despite having loads of planets.
Why did they not just make a single solar system full of curated content, why did it have to be set in the vast universe forcing them to use random generation, that is full of nothing? They sent themselves up to fail on this one.
after starfield i finally played Outer Wilds (not a typo) and goodness, i have so much more memories with that game than starfield, despite the fact i finished it in half the time i beat starfield
if you’re craving incredibly crafted space exploration play Outer Wilds, don’t look up anything about it though, it’s one of those that will make you wish for amnesia so you can experience it again for the first time
The expansion is very good too if you haven’t played it yet. Luckily my memory isn’t the best so when I managed to replay the game after finally picking up the DLC I got to rediscover many parts of the game.
look at no mans sky, i still think its just as boring as when it released
I get opinions are subjective, but I don’t believe this is a fair opinion to have, based on the amount of new content they have released over the life of the game. They’ve added more quests and more things to do and explore.
It’s a very sandboxy game, which may be what you’re speaking towards (if you don’t enjoy sandbox games that is)?
There’s no voiceover work to be spoken of. You’re constantly just reading dialog and menus. The loop isn’t that different from almost any other open world survival crafting game, except it has spaceships you can fly from planet to space - just like in Space Engineers an arguably better space sandbox game that’s actually a sandbox.
My comment was directed towards this though, and not what you mentioned …
i still think its just as boring as when it released
… I was challenging the before and after nature that the OP was commenting about, especially after all the new content that was added to NMS over the years.
When I mentioned sandbox that was because I was trying to determine if he’s a ‘guided path’ versus ‘sandbox’ type of player, and maybe that’s what might be driving his boredom factor throughout the life of NMS, versus the before and after nature comparison.
As far as your comment goes (see below), none of that talks towards the boredom of the NMS game, just a similarity to other survival games, as well as mentioning another sandbox game that you thought was better.
There’s no voiceover work to be spoken of. You’re constantly just reading dialog and menus. The loop isn’t that different from almost any other open world survival crafting game, except it has spaceships you can fly from planet to space - just like in Space Engineers an arguably better space sandbox game that’s actually a sandbox.
I bought it about 2 years after launch, played through the main story, and then kinda got bored with it because it’s just the same thing over and over again. I came back after the first major update, played it for a few weeks and then got bored again because it was mostly a “fixing things to how we wanted them to be”. I played after the next major update as well and while it did bring some new life back into the game, it’s still essentially just “build a base to put these few things in and collect resources so you can build more stuff” or “do these pointless side quests so that you can buy/build more stuff”.
Thanks for the clarification. I am curious about one thing though?
Are you a ‘sandbox’ type of player, or a ‘guided path’ type of player (if you had to choose one)?
I’m wondering if you’re the latter type of player, and if it has driven your outlook on the game, throughout all the years it’s existed, with all the additional content added to it throughout those years?
Yeah it’s funny to mention NMS, as what I’ve heard from most people is that you’d have money AND get more value by buying that particular today over Starfield
Usually the latter, but I have played various sandbox games over the years. I find that sandbox style games tend to get boring after a while due to the repetitive nature and little variation. I’d usually skip the “fetch” quests in RPGs for the same reason.
It’s cool to build huge bases, but I see little point in if there’s only like 5 useful things that you can put in it. The majority of my space was taken up by storage containers.
i watched all of the update for NMS. the updates are cool but non of them made it more interesting. i would like to say i think it is a good game, but at the end of the day starfield aligns with my likes much better.
I got so damn bored. After 40 hours I put the game down and said to myself “I don’t think I’ll be playing this again.” It just all seemed so pointless.
Pointless is definitely the word. Some of he coolest systems in the game are ship building and base building, but the half baked new game plus bullshit gameplay loop fucking deletes all that
True, but games are different and an open-world game should be fun for far longer than for example a linear shooter, due to density and freedom with sandbox elements.
Couple of hours in (on console) and it just feels a bit fiddly, and… not sure why I need to be doing what I am. There’s some attempt at providing intrigue, but none of it makes me want to come back. I got an Xbox and Game Pass for it, yet I’ve been playing Slay the Spire (which I’ve already played hundreds of hours on Deck/PC) a lot instead.
Comments like this always makes me wonder, was this just a simple misclick, or are there just a chunk of users who are too technologically inept to figure out how to reply to comments?
Lol, I was thinking the same thing. I agree with what he’s saying, but he just looks like he’s punching air when nobody is doing what he’s accusing them of.
I was incredibly tempted to pre-order Starfield. Everything about it should be right up my alley. I love Sci-fi, space and all things related. But I learned my lesson after pre-ordering Diablo 4. I decided to try out the pirated version shortly after release and was so disappointed and glad I didn’t buy it. I dropped it after a few hours and had no desire to play it after that.
Also coming into it straight after playing Baldur’s Gate 3 made it look so dated. The plastic doll looking NPC’s and animations, boring dialogue and writing. I’m not even that into fantasy/D&D type settings and BG3 drew me in for many hours.
I really hope someone makes a game as good as BG3 but set in space, similar to Mass Effect etc.
I feel exactly the same. DND and fantasy settings aren’t my thing, but I still enjoyed the heck out of BG3 for the story and characters. If Larian made a sci fi game that would be amazing.
I think BG3 is making a lot of normal quality games look really bad this year. Like putting a super model in a picture of normally okay people.
That said BG3’s true innovation was literally just putting the work in. They didn’t make anything truly new, they just did everything game developers have learned in the last 40 years to a very high standard.
The one thing I would argue that is a bit “new” is that they had a design paradigm similar to immersive sims on their systems, and that is not so common on these kind of top down rpg.
But yeah, the real “innovation” was just making an actually polished game.
I just started BG3, it feels like a modern Dragon Age, Mass Effect with serious focus on the RPG elements. The posing and character models aren’t a leap like the Witcher 3, but the voice acting is top notch
Yeah, similar for me. On one had, the idea of a space based “Skyrim” type game sounded pretty cool.
On the other hand, yet another Bethesda “skyrim/fallout” type of game has been overdone without much innovation by Bethesda. So my hopes were quite tempered.
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No! Why would you say that? What a weird Idea. People are saying it’s a shit game because it is a shit game.
If it was a shit game, why does it need to keep getting mentioned?
It sucks, move on with your life.
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It keeps getting mentioned because it’s the new Bethesda game (also its kind of a big deal being their first new IP in, what, 20 years?), it hasn’t been even a year since it dropped (so it’s still fresh to people), and it has more content coming. And because every new update will stir the old users again and bring a new wave of users that will also keep mentioning its improvements and its flaws.
And i mean, even aside from that, Oblivion and Morrowind still get mentioned to this day (in both good ways and bad), and they’re much older. Same’s going to happen to Starfield. It’s just the way it is.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m not even saying it sucks really, to me it’s just not super compelling so far. End of story. Not gonna talk about it anymore. And I’ve decided after this thread that Starfield is going in my Lemmy content filter. I don’t care in the least how much people hate it so I don’t need to read about it every 4 days.
No. It’s got nothing to do with “Haters being Haters”. The camel’s back just finally broke.
Frankly, it’s something that I’m surprised didn’t happen sooner. People got tired of excusing Bethesda’s many blunders since they joined Microsoft (because after that, they should have no excuse for mediocre…anything, especially on the technical side) Bethesda also got too used to people giving them a pass and going “oh, silly Bethesda!” when they saw a severe bug or just bad/mediocre mechanics, where if it was anyone else, they’d be rightfully upset that they paid fully AAA price and the game was a broken, bug filled mess (sometimes with bugs that date back to Morrowind, at that), and is finally feeling that burn others normally get. It was cute (apparently) in 2006 with Oblivion, it’s no longer cute in 2023.
It’s also likely to do with Bethesda’s attitude. Them responding to criticism about some planets being empty and boring to explore with things like “it’s not boring. When Armstrong and the gang landed on the moon IRL, they weren’t bored” or just passive aggresively in general to negative reviews with actual critisms of the game instead of taking the critisim to heart and striving to maybe add some content to them as an update (or DLC, but them charging $70, then asking for more money to fix a problem in the base game would bring em more heat than anything) being some examples.
Or the fact that, instead of fixing severe bugs or optimizing their game, they’re introducing this Creations thing and basically doing what i said in parenthesis above.
I love when people actually critique games, that’s how you get better games. Just refund and leave a non-aggressive negative review, let them know the concerns, blind fans are still going to call ‘hate’, but their claim has no foundation if you are just genuinely being a critic. People really settle for average and ‘rinse and repeat’ games, you can demand more, don’t bend over to these AAA companies.
Seriously though, stop buying games in the first week or two of them releasing, let the dust settle first, they aren’t going anywhere.
Yup. That second bit should be a golden standard, but…honestly? Knowing companies hire psychiatrists and all that jazz that tell them exactly what they need to put out there to get people to buy, install FOMO, hit addicts where it hurts, or just wear them down till they eventually say “yes”, and that its not just for games, it becomes kinda murky for me to just throw all the blame at the people buying. Not saying that people shouldn’t do their do dilagence (and after a while, to learn to ignore said marketing tricks. Fool me once and all that), they absolutely should, just that the other side are also hitting bellow the belt every chance they can in order to make a sale.
Yeah, it’s hard to throw all the blame on people when there’s so many engineered tactics to tempt people to buy stuff, but there’s got to be a point where you realise you don’t really need that special skin for pre-ordering, you won’t even use it and you won’t even be playing the game in a year. I’d like to see more regulations on it all, just to protect the people who struggle to protect themselves from predatory business tactics.
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Fair, but here’s the thing:
It’s a big release with a life cycle. Big release by the guys who made Skyrim? it’s going to continue to get new people even after it’s life cycle officially ends. So as long as Bethesda keeps digging themselves deeper instead of out the hole they made, the negative reviews and press will keep coming; by these new folks and the current players who see Bethesda basically making the situation worse in order to give any curious buyers a warning to be mindful at what they’re going to throw money at. Do some people sometimes go a bit too scathing in their takes? Sure. But honestly? I’m not gonna blame em. I know a disillusioned person when i see one, and disillusioned or otherwise, they’re still not at all wrong with most of their complaints.
the “hater” thing…yeah, most of these aren’t haters. If they were bringing up BS claims, sure (See: The Pronouns thing). But the majority of “hate” this game is getting is…actual shortcomings the game has, or for the pretty crappy responses the devs put out in response. Dare I say it, most of the “hate” is by actual fans of Bethesda. Again, very disillusioned likely now former fans, but yeah. Haters don’t spend the energy to go this indepth about something, fans passionate about the thing typically do tho.
Like i said in my other comment, the camel’s back broke for a lot of people after 13 long years. Not 5 or 3 years, 13. Even more if you were a Bethesda fan before Skyrim.
I cannot agree with a lot of this, that it’s a justified never ending series of hate waves. I especially cannot agree these are Bethesda fans. Every comment thread typically contains a shitload of vitriol toward them specifically, calling it out by name.
I was a huge fan of Skyrim and fallout 3/4. I bought Starfield, hated the map, found the game kind of interesting but not obsession level compelling, and just haven’t played it much. It couldn’t be less interesting to me to obsessively hate it. There isn’t a way it could be bad enough to talk about over and over. It’s old news. I may pick it up later when I’m bored and get into it, or I may not. Life moves on. I think people need to see it as what it is, a video game, and as such there are much more important things in life. Play the ones you like and be done with it.
Having said all this the hate waves don’t seem to be stopping so I’m simply going to add Starfield to my content filter. Just simply don’t give a shit.
People leave steam reviews when they’ve played a game. There’s no deadline. So why wouldn’t new reviews be coming in? It happens to all games. Why should Starfield be different?
Steam reviews months later aren’t really newsworthy imo. Nor are they interesting.
The fact that everyone is commenting on it suggests otherwise
it confirms my theory that people are hateful and want an outlet to, as bad as I hate this term, “circlejerk” to
Its getting regular updates. I think every 6 weeks. Each new update will disturb the water, when it either breaks what few mods are out already and someone quits fixing it, or when the update fails to fix/creates a new bug and someone finds that to be too much.
Then a new wave of annoyed people will reignite the conversation.
Youre also going to see each time that more and more people start talking praise on the game. As some people do just like it as is, and as updates repair or add enough things that some people are willing to consider “enough” to undo the previous flaws.
How much of each depends on if those updates are actually ever good, or if theyre lackluster or fail to stick to the called shot schedule.
It couldn’t possibly be the fact that the game is just mid as all fuck, and people are far enough past the honeymoon phase that they’re finally having to accept it.
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People posting OPINIONS on a site made for posting OPINIONS?!
How DARE they?!
I think it’s more like “why are they bothering?” Like, usually for these kinds of single-player games, the reviews improve over time because once the nature of the game is well known, new prospective buyers are more likely to be correct about whether they’ll like it or not, so new reviews are mostly from people who self-selected for being likely to enjoy the game.
So either people are getting worse at knowing if they’ll like Starfield before they buy it, or they’re buying it despite knowing they probably won’t like it so they can leave a negative review, or people who bought it at release are going back and reviewing it months later.
There was a narrative it got review bombed I think. So people can get into it thinking it’s not that but it ends up being exactly what they feared.
If there is a game that has mixed reviews, I sometimes still go for it if I feel really interesred. It could just be “hit or miss” thing and I could still love it while some hate it.
This can be people doing the same thing and majority finding out it’s not working for them. Also, there is a sale on Steam, so likely many people got it for themselves, or for Christmas
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I suspect that it is a third, more obvious reason.
People are being entitled taint-lickers. It does suck that its optimization is poor, but I’m on a 4 year-old PC build and my CPU was not top-end even then, with a 3070 and I have had zero issues running it. The space travel should be more interesting, they really fucked up by making space piracy basically impossible, so you can’t ever profit by taking the ships of people who actively try to murder you. There’s a lot that could be more engaging, but also the reviews of Elex are mostly positive and it’s one of the worst, most quest-bugged half finished pieces of shit I’ve ever played, with basically nothing going for it beside decent art and a unique story. The game is trash and I wasted way too much time on it. Starfield is vastly better. Not amazing, but solidly OK. Without the social-media circle-jerk, there is no way the reviews would continue to get worse as they continue to address performance issues and fix bugs.
Yes, and Piranha Bytes is small AA German game studio with a staggering 33 people as of 2021 (according to wikipedia) that have always stuck to their lane and made very niche games in the background that are basically only appealling to their audience. They know damn well who they’re aiming at with their stuff too, because they’re not trying to change the formula much as of Elex 2 or grab as much people as possible.
You can compare that to Bethesda (that according to inside sources, wants to act like a AA when they’re acctually AAA in manpower, budget, and project scope), with it’s 450 people on staff and different subsidaries that work together with them as needed, to Piranha Bytes, but that’d be disingenuous as all hell.
Its insane to me that you just compared those two games
If only because a lot of the positive reviews for elex are extremely vocal about the way the game falls flat and fails to give a good experience, and that the thumbs up is because of the knowledge of the devs small size.
“People are entitled taint-lickers because they don’t like something that I like”
You sound like a lot of fun to be around.
There is something to be said for the game to be hyped for YEARS and to come out being much less than what the hype seemed to imply. Running on the old and tired poorly-optimized “not Gamebryo” engine, a bunch of fetch quests punctuated by fast travel “exploration”, and mostly empty procedurally-generated planets bolted in to make Todd Howard’s vision of 1000 planets a hollow reality… all of that can get people feeling pretty underwhelmed with the game.
It isn’t necessarily that Starfield is bad, but that it is not great, and that it continues to be pushed as some amazing experience it isn’t. Sorry Todd, but I’ve been to some of the Wonders of the World before. I’m not going to be in awe of your virtual empty planet and the vastness of space and how beautiful it is through a computer screen. It just doesn’t hit the same way that you want it to, especially in the way most gamers will experience it.
Here’s the kicker, though… some parts of Starfield can become great. Fallout 76 was bad and got better when Wastelanders added NPCs, so it stands to reason they could make some sizable shifts that make the game more enjoyable.
Starfield fast traveled to mostly negative
It’s funny. Everyone bitches that there’s no content and the world is bland, and then says “you can fast travel everywhere so there’s nothing in-between nodes.” Maybe, just maybe if people traveled between locations by actually launching into space and walking around in towns they’d run into all the random events that made me take 2 hours to cross the street in some places. Instead everyone just jumps point to point and says “the only thing interesting is the main story.” Is Starfield a GOTY quality game? No. But people sure seem to be going out of their way to play the game in bad faith for a bad review.
Or the developers could have put the story hooks in front of fast travel instead of hiding them? Look at Baldur’s Gate 3 with fast travel nodes. You can pick up several quests just by going to a few nodes. And other quests are found on the logical route to complete story quests. And a few are explorer rewards.
The thing is, this is a game design thing we’ve known for over a decade now. So no, if the quests are easily missable, it’s not the player’s fault for not finding them.
You are aware that there isn’t anywhere to go while in space, right? You can’t manually fly from Cydonia to Deimos Staryards, nor can you go “beyond” the bounds of the planet cell you’re in. You can’t go from a “Settlement” planetary POI to an “Abandoned Mine” POI that is some 200km away from it without fast travel.
That’s on the game design. If players feel the need to fast travel then they aren’t linking to the side stories to the path of the main game well enough. Spider-man had fast travel, i used it once for the trophy and never touched it again because traversal was so good in the game. Red Dead did it brilliantly too. I’m not sure if fast travel existed or not, I never looked for it. The world was rewarding everywhere.
and these guys thought they deserved GOTY
It’s bad
Weird. Bethesday replying to reviews refusing to acknowledge their game is boring didnt help then? Who could have thought
I personally really enjoyed the trip. Far from perfect, and more a 2010 game in its core, but quite entertaining. However, I would have been disappointed if I had to pay 80€ for it (especially because this game lacks polish). I had no hesitation thanks to the gamepass, and I have no regret playing 100h to it :).
I think the backlash is a bit excessive. It feels like people expected this game to be exceptional, having huge expectations that were never met. It’s Bethesda, how can we expect a master piece from them on day one? Besides, it’s not like a success like Skyrim can be reproduced that easily. It’s not bad to have expectations, but if the game is different than what you had in mind, it’s not the game’s fault imo (and it happens too frequently those years, as if all major releases are bad games that should never be played).
It’s the same people who were sending death threats to CDPR over Cyberpunk. They had built up up an internal hype saying that [insert game] was going to replace their life, and they would have no reason to ever leave their computer again. When that obviously didn’t happen (and it had the some bugs on launch, although not universally game-crashing levels of bugs like Skyrim on launch, which people seem to forget) they decided that they needed to stomp the game into the ground and nobody was allowed to enjoy it ever. Unfortunately the internet is all bandwagon these days and the petulant children have managed to get a cloud of negativity to hang around the game. Talk to some adults about the game and you’ll find that it’s solid enough, with a decent amount of gameplay. Is it worth $100? No, buy it on sale for like 30 or 40, but these people saying you are garbage for not believing that the Bethesda team needs to be lynched over this really need yo take their spoiled heads out of their collective ass.
I watched a bit of gameplay. If I had purchased it, I would be refunding it. I think that’s enough for a negative review.
People are too harsh for me I guess 😅.
These are just a few random quotes I found with a minute of Googling but there are many more out there. I think people were expecting exceptional and had huge expectations because Bethesda and Microsoft were very much pushing the hype train a lot. They set up the game as one thing and what was delivered was a pale shadow of it. I agree you can’t expect for the success of Skyrim, but it was 100% presented to the world like it would be. There are many parts of the game that fall short of what Skyrim did 13 years ago and what other Bethesda RPGs were doing decades ago in terms of quest design and dialogue.
Yes, it seems to be it. I personally do not like this way of thinking. Marketing is always going to put up some lies in order to sell the product. It feels strange to me to judge a game from what the marketing said about it, instead of what the game truly is. Of course, it would be very disappointing if you can only rely on what the marketing said when deciding to buy or not buy the game. But with all the options available nowadays (reviews, streams, test it for 10€ thanks to the gamepass instead of paying 80€ directly), it seems strange to me to spend so much money, without informing yourself enough, and be this angry afterwards.
As I said, it’s not like the game is perfect, but it’s far to be as bad as those « user reviews » depicts.
Starfield probably hasn’t lived up to anyone’s expectations but people are acting like it’s not a solid game still.
I got Starfield free with my new graphics card and tbh I’m glad that was the case as otherwise I’d have serious buyers remorse. I put a good 50 or so hours into the game, enough to finish the main storyline and most of the factions quests, but at the end of the day it just felt like a hollow experience, and I doubt I’ll be going back to replay it.
The NPCs are shallow and robotic, and once you’ve explored their dialogue tree once you may as well never talk to them again as they’ll never say anything new.
The game worlds look quite visually impressive but aside from the handful of cities and occasional settlements and outposts there is just nothing to do. Who would have guessed simulating a lifeless grey rock would be boring?
The fast travel system is completely broken and ruins the purported objective of the game; to explore. Instead of encouraging the player to do so by landing on planets to find fuel for their ship, the player can just teleport across the galaxy with no consequences.
The only aspect of the game I found to be really fun was the space combat. The ship builder, while quite frustrating at times, was also enjoyable.
Overall, Starfield feels like a game whose ambitions exceed the technical capabilities of the engine it is based on. You can see the janky workarounds that are used to make the game fit the engine from a mile away; cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view, invisible barriers in the world to prevent you from walking too far without reloading, a cut to black when transiting between interiors and exteriors, and the same dull and lifeless NPC “AI” (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.
It’s past time that BGS put the rotting hulk that is Gamebryo/Creation Engine/whatever this latest iteration is called out to pasture (at least for new IPs like this) as clearly it is now actively hindering their creative ambitions.
I mostly agree, but making me land on boring planets to farm for fuel will not improve the game. It’ll just make it more tedious.
Now, if there was a questline to find and repair or create fuel depots in each system, that could actually be fun.
The problem keeps coming back to planets being really boring outside of a few hotspots. If they solved that problem, a lot of the other problems wouldn’t be nearly as noticeable. But instead, they dug in their heels and declared that real astronauts don’t find them boring. And I’m not even sure I believe that. The first steps were very exciting, but after that, it was mostly just anxiety about dying and making sure they prevent that. They’d actually be fighting down the boredom to make sure they didn’t make a stupid mistake out of complacency.
Oh yes, 100% - if they were to implement a fuel system, then just mining for fuel manually on the existing planets would be incredibly dull. Building something like a fuel refinery on the other hand would make sense - it would even give a purpose to habitats/planetary bases, which are completely superfluous at the moment. At no point in the game did I need to build one, and if the game didn’t keep reminding me that base building existed I would probably have forgotten all about that feature.
That’s a tradition going back to Fallout though. Why should you build a base in Fallout 4? Because you can’t advance the game without doing so. Beyond a crafting station it was completely superfluous. I’m not surprised they haven’t figured out how to have it be a natural impulse yet.
They probably have, but decided to not bother, “too much work” involved. I mean, I can easily think of many ways to make outposts something players would look forward to mechanically:
Docking is more egregious. It’s not even hiding a loading screen, it’s just wasting our time so things like the CF/SysDef back and forth take longer.
It’s worse IMO, NPCs don’t seem to have schedules anymore. Which is kind of okay, my least favorite thing in Skyrim was shops being closed because there’s no “fast travel and arrive in the morning” option, but they feel a lot less alive when they stand in one place forever.
About lack of schedules, at least for shops, there’s a very easy solution: have a second NPC for the night shift, sharing the same inventory. That way the shop stays open 24h and the npcs can still have some downtime.
i had a lot of fun. i think people just expect too much from this type of game and bethesda. look at no mans sky, i still think its just as boring as when it released but it has gained a great following. people now seem to just assume if a game is made by a AAA team everyone must love it regardless of personal taste. in my opinion that mind set is the reason most AAA get focus grouped to death. im scared that people are going to kill off the type of games i like because everyone acts like its crime to release a game that doesn’t appeal to everyones exact tastes/desires.
i will say though starfield is my least favorite bethesda game. starfield 7/10
The problem is that the game fell flat even on a lot of basic expectations, especially exploration.
When you first arrive on a new star, you’re automagically orbiting the “most important planet”, if it has one. Without doing anything other than arriving, you already know all the inorganic resources of every planet and moon around that star (you don’t know where, but you already know it’s there without a scan). Not only that, you know which planets have abandoned mines or settlements and where. While flying in orbit, if “nothing happens” in the first 10 seconds, nothing will happen, period. POI in space all have to be fast traveled to.
It manages to be worse than NMS where the parallel is obvious, like in scanning fauna/flora, where you activate the scanner, point and click and call it day. But do it 8 times just to say it’s different.
Shipbuilding is fun, but the fucked that up by locking many parts behind two different skills, Piloting and Starship Design. It really feels like something they did because they couldn’t figure a way to balance the economy around ship prices. They could’ve made it so that you get access to better parts by completing faction missions, that’d give actual reason for the players to do them other than sheer curiosity, but nope, spend precious skill points to get better ship parts!
This game is a pile of bad design decisions on top of more bad design decisions and whether the company is AAA or not is irrelevant. Bad implementation, aka errors and bugs, is a matter of coding. Bad design is a matter of direction, or lack thereof.
And upgrades locked behind levels, plus not having all parts at all shipyards (or even all parts of one brand at their main location).
i agree that the exploration outside of the main areas is very sparce, but i think its important to cosider thats is what was promised, and the lore backs it up. i liked the hand-crafted areas a lot but outside of those areas tends to feel like NMS with a couple generic things to do every some often. but i still enjoyed building my bases and running in a circle around them destorying all abandon factories with rando baddies i could find.
i agree the fact that they are a AAA studio is irrelevant, but most people do judge things differently when considering this. its too often i see people praising indie games that i eventually try and hate. but i dont freak out and call it terrible, i stop playing. and i see well made AAA games that i greatly enjoy get review bombed for defending there design decisions which were based of what the designers consider fun.
but i dont agree that they made a “pile” of bad decisions. Again i think they were trying to make a fun game and most of the designer probably enjoyed playing it before releasing. but the majority of people who thought bethesda was making “their” dream space shooter didn’t like it so know bethesda is evil for some reason. i liked this game, i will play the dlc, and likely replay it.
I agree that the skill-locked purchase of physical equipment is garbage but I found myself sticking on the question of if you got the ‘de-facto’ best ship part for each category because you had the relevant skill.
Like some quest is occuring and, in dialogue, you have a choice locked by being the most-skilled pilot and choosing it leads to one set of the best ship parts. How does that flow? Does that read as the same thing, or is it more enjoyable now as a reward for character build?
You got my idea wrong
I meant that, as a reward for finishing a quest, or series of quests, the ship parts become available. It’s not “choose to get a ship part during the quest”, it’s “complete quest, vendors now sell new stuff”.
For instance, completing mission 4 of the UC Vanguard opens up B class parts because “congratulations, we’re promoting you” or, given how that questline flows, “We’re promoting you because things are getting dangerous and you need access to the extra stuff”. Completing the final mission unlocks C class parts. But those are only at the Deimos Staryards, since they’re the sole contractor for UC. It wouldn’t make sense to complete their questline and also get access to FC’s B and C class ship parts, for that you’d have to complete their Freestar Ranger questline. That’s the idea.
I knew what to expect, and I was still disappointed. I was expecting the constant loading, and the jank, and the shit AI, etc. I was also expecting the world building to be decent, and the quests to be interesting with tons of distractions that keep you coming back. That’s what makes it a disappointment; the actually good things about a Bethesda RPG are totally absent in Starfield. It’s just the mechanics and formula; none of the flair or personality.
If only old school Bethesda fans had warned us of this trend of Bethesda removing the very things that make their games worthwhile for their last four major releases.
Still a 7? Just curious, what made it fun for you? What were the expectations? Legit curious, as finding a good comment about the game that doesnt sound salty af is far in between.
I found skyrim fun for 60ish hours and than got extremely bored. Never touched it again. Starfield looked like that but barren as hell, which is not what it is sold as. Those are my personal reasons for not touching it though!
Not op but I too give it 6 or 7. I liked the story. I liked shooting things. I liked the dialogue. I liked the base building. Liked the graphics, it was super quick for me on my 4900 xt. But everything was liked. Not loved. It was mediocre in everything. The POI were fun, but there are like 10 that get recycled. I like the planets but they’re also recycled. I like the cities but they’re all the size of a tiny town. It’s fun but it was sold as something grand which undersold it’s promises. First colony outside of earth, biggest civilization, has like a population of 100 if that. They should have sold the entire story as worlds on the rim. Not the hub of humanity.
yeah i would agree with you for the most part. i guess im lucky i ignored the hype after the announcement. i have seen the hype train derail too many times.
well, i thought of it as fallout 4 in space before playing. it has a couple core gameplay changes i liked and a couple i didn’t. it is the slowest paced bethesda game for sure, which is why i think most people call it boring. if you didnt replay skyrim i doubt you would replay this game. i give it a 7/10 for people of my taste and i would consider myself the intended audience. i have played bethesda games since oblivion and average about 200 hours per bethesda game, usually 3 playthroughs seperated by about a year or 2. for reference here are my top bethesda games:
these scores reflect how much i enjoyed each game. but if New Vegas had no technical issues it would be 10/10 for me.
Can I mod new Vegas to make it look or perform better on an Xbox? The graphics really break my immersion.
The Xbox version sucks ass, easily the buggiest version. Play it on PC, anything can run it now.
New Vegas has no technical issues if you mod it properly these days!
Mirrors from a tower plant magically turning into solar panels when installed on an airbase? 0/10 unplayable.
Ye, that makes perfect sense, thanks! From your other scoring, i can see the game isnt that bad, but just average. Even compared to the others, which are rated a lot higher. From this i can also assume id enjoy the game for like 30sh hours, because this isnt 100% my jam. For me that wouldnt be worth the full price, but i can understand for somebody that would put 200h in np it would be worth it :)
yeah pretty much. i wouldnt recommend it to anybody that doesn’t love bethesda’s other games.
It’s on game pass if you want a (potentially) cheaper way to try it.
No thanks. Im personally against gsme pass. I dont like their model snd prefer to own things
Yeah it’s not a bad game by any standards, but it’s not mind-blowingly great either. It has some cool and interesting concepts.
People expected a game about exploration. Because it’s a Bethesda game, and because it’s a space bethesda game, and somehow Bethesda managed to make a game that doesn’t really have exploration in it despite having loads of planets.
Why did they not just make a single solar system full of curated content, why did it have to be set in the vast universe forcing them to use random generation, that is full of nothing? They sent themselves up to fail on this one.
Make it some weird bizarre aliens that can live without atmosphere and have it set on an extremely small pair of binary moons set to real scale.
i think they thought it would be more fun than most people seem to think it is. and being wrong is an easy path to failure.
after starfield i finally played Outer Wilds (not a typo) and goodness, i have so much more memories with that game than starfield, despite the fact i finished it in half the time i beat starfield
if you’re craving incredibly crafted space exploration play Outer Wilds, don’t look up anything about it though, it’s one of those that will make you wish for amnesia so you can experience it again for the first time
The expansion is very good too if you haven’t played it yet. Luckily my memory isn’t the best so when I managed to replay the game after finally picking up the DLC I got to rediscover many parts of the game.
oh i did, it was absolutely wonderful and terrifying
Yeah “reduced frights” mode was required for me to get through some sections lol. Incredibly well done addition though.
I actually haven’t finished the DLC because that single menu option very literally gave me nightmares. I gotta suck it up and play.
it’s worth it! but don’t be ashamed to take breaks, the devs know how to do horror well and it shows
I get opinions are subjective, but I don’t believe this is a fair opinion to have, based on the amount of new content they have released over the life of the game. They’ve added more quests and more things to do and explore.
It’s a very sandboxy game, which may be what you’re speaking towards (if you don’t enjoy sandbox games that is)?
There’s no voiceover work to be spoken of. You’re constantly just reading dialog and menus. The loop isn’t that different from almost any other open world survival crafting game, except it has spaceships you can fly from planet to space - just like in Space Engineers an arguably better space sandbox game that’s actually a sandbox.
My comment was directed towards this though, and not what you mentioned …
… I was challenging the before and after nature that the OP was commenting about, especially after all the new content that was added to NMS over the years.
When I mentioned sandbox that was because I was trying to determine if he’s a ‘guided path’ versus ‘sandbox’ type of player, and maybe that’s what might be driving his boredom factor throughout the life of NMS, versus the before and after nature comparison.
As far as your comment goes (see below), none of that talks towards the boredom of the NMS game, just a similarity to other survival games, as well as mentioning another sandbox game that you thought was better.
I bought it about 2 years after launch, played through the main story, and then kinda got bored with it because it’s just the same thing over and over again. I came back after the first major update, played it for a few weeks and then got bored again because it was mostly a “fixing things to how we wanted them to be”. I played after the next major update as well and while it did bring some new life back into the game, it’s still essentially just “build a base to put these few things in and collect resources so you can build more stuff” or “do these pointless side quests so that you can buy/build more stuff”.
Thanks for the clarification. I am curious about one thing though?
Are you a ‘sandbox’ type of player, or a ‘guided path’ type of player (if you had to choose one)?
I’m wondering if you’re the latter type of player, and if it has driven your outlook on the game, throughout all the years it’s existed, with all the additional content added to it throughout those years?
Yeah it’s funny to mention NMS, as what I’ve heard from most people is that you’d have money AND get more value by buying that particular today over Starfield
Starfield is essentially NMS with a storyline and better graphics.
Usually the latter, but I have played various sandbox games over the years. I find that sandbox style games tend to get boring after a while due to the repetitive nature and little variation. I’d usually skip the “fetch” quests in RPGs for the same reason.
It’s cool to build huge bases, but I see little point in if there’s only like 5 useful things that you can put in it. The majority of my space was taken up by storage containers.
i watched all of the update for NMS. the updates are cool but non of them made it more interesting. i would like to say i think it is a good game, but at the end of the day starfield aligns with my likes much better.
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I got so damn bored. After 40 hours I put the game down and said to myself “I don’t think I’ll be playing this again.” It just all seemed so pointless.
Pointless is definitely the word. Some of he coolest systems in the game are ship building and base building, but the half baked new game plus bullshit gameplay loop fucking deletes all that
You can’t even get 40 hours playtime in most games.
If you can’t get 40 hours out of a AAA game then it wasn’t a AAA game.
True, but games are different and an open-world game should be fun for far longer than for example a linear shooter, due to density and freedom with sandbox elements.
Most games don’t aim to provide hundreds.
Couple of hours in (on console) and it just feels a bit fiddly, and… not sure why I need to be doing what I am. There’s some attempt at providing intrigue, but none of it makes me want to come back. I got an Xbox and Game Pass for it, yet I’ve been playing Slay the Spire (which I’ve already played hundreds of hours on Deck/PC) a lot instead.
I am glad I had a free amd cpu with this game.
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Who are you replying to?
Comments like this always makes me wonder, was this just a simple misclick, or are there just a chunk of users who are too technologically inept to figure out how to reply to comments?
Lol, I was thinking the same thing. I agree with what he’s saying, but he just looks like he’s punching air when nobody is doing what he’s accusing them of.
It reads just like my comments, when i don’t reply to the comment i was reading, but to the post itself …
But it’s something i always notice and fix straight away.
Funny game, but is boring af if you played anything from Bethesda
I was incredibly tempted to pre-order Starfield. Everything about it should be right up my alley. I love Sci-fi, space and all things related. But I learned my lesson after pre-ordering Diablo 4. I decided to try out the pirated version shortly after release and was so disappointed and glad I didn’t buy it. I dropped it after a few hours and had no desire to play it after that.
Also coming into it straight after playing Baldur’s Gate 3 made it look so dated. The plastic doll looking NPC’s and animations, boring dialogue and writing. I’m not even that into fantasy/D&D type settings and BG3 drew me in for many hours.
I really hope someone makes a game as good as BG3 but set in space, similar to Mass Effect etc.
The real reason behind anti-piracy efforts: They might find out our software sucks without having to buy it to figure that out.
/s. Sorta.
I feel exactly the same. DND and fantasy settings aren’t my thing, but I still enjoyed the heck out of BG3 for the story and characters. If Larian made a sci fi game that would be amazing.
I think BG3 is making a lot of normal quality games look really bad this year. Like putting a super model in a picture of normally okay people.
That said BG3’s true innovation was literally just putting the work in. They didn’t make anything truly new, they just did everything game developers have learned in the last 40 years to a very high standard.
The one thing I would argue that is a bit “new” is that they had a design paradigm similar to immersive sims on their systems, and that is not so common on these kind of top down rpg.
But yeah, the real “innovation” was just making an actually polished game.
I just started BG3, it feels like a modern Dragon Age, Mass Effect with serious focus on the RPG elements. The posing and character models aren’t a leap like the Witcher 3, but the voice acting is top notch
I mean there is Rogue Trader. Not BG3 level, but what I’ve heard it is pretty good.
Yeah, similar for me. On one had, the idea of a space based “Skyrim” type game sounded pretty cool.
On the other hand, yet another Bethesda “skyrim/fallout” type of game has been overdone without much innovation by Bethesda. So my hopes were quite tempered.
Fingers crossed on Larian getting a licence for Traveller…