I dunno. I finished Borderlands 3 years ago, and I still pick it up and play regularly. I’ve played the campaign through four times - once for each character.
Heck, I’d still be playing Destiny if it hadn’t gone to total shit with the focus on coop.
Long before that, I played the original God of War trilogy through multiple times, and it didn’t even have different character classes.
It’s not my bag, but there are people out there playing Skyrim for years. Hell, I fire up No Man’s Sky every so often, and I bought it on release when it was really rough.
It’s common for people to replay good games. I’m not even sure what the point of Starfield is - are they trying to be an MMORPG? If so, that huge of a player loss is a massive failure. If it’s not - why is it even online? Isn’t it supposed to be some massive, explorable universe with endless gaming possibilities?
Starfield isn’t online. It’s very much a single-player RPG. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think I have about 200 hours into it. The biggest problem is that while there is a vast galaxy to explore, there’s not much point. You can travel wherever you want, but unless you’re doing a mission, there’s not much to do once you get there. Walking around looking at plants and animals gets boring very quickly.
The way enemies scale with your skill level isn’t great, either. Maybe it’s how I spec’d my character, but at the higher levels, I am essentially invincible in person-to-person combat but ship-to-ship combat is exceptionally difficult.
It’s still one of my favorite games, but it doesn’t lend itself to replayability after a while.
I love Bethesda, but putting TES6 on the back burner to make Starfield for eight years was an idiotic decision. They also took the wrong lesson from Skyrim, believing that streamlining the game through stripping of features was the reason for its success. They’ve done this same with each successive game since, and each has been more poorly received than the last. Go back to your roots and make a good, deep Elder Scrolls game. Continue to leave the shitty +5 modifier leveling system out, but at the very least restore attributes and birthsigns. Restore spellmaking. STOP FUCKING IT UP. You’re on your last strike here and I don’t have a lot of faith that you’re going to make the right call.
I have a hard time believing they spent one year on this game, let alone eight. Half of it, including the game’s engine, the leveling system, and the fucking dragonshouts in space, is pulled from existing sources, the writing sucks, the base building is a pointless perk sink, there’s maybe three dozen unique structures copy-pasted again and again, the enemies are spongy and boring as hell, and despite being Bethesda’s “Least Buggy” work to date, it’s still chock-a-block with bugs.
You know what I think? I think they jerked around exactly like Randy Pitchford did with DNF and they’re trying to pretend they didn’t.
To play devil’s advocate, Starfield is absolutely a better RPG than Skyrim when it comes to roleplaying, quest design, and more. They made huge improvements to complexity and options for the player.
They just also paired that with awful world design, and could no longer rely on lore written by GOATs no longer working for the company.
I don’t even know, if I would normally truly agree that simplification isn’t at least aiding their mass appeal, but Starfield did get absolutely stumped by a traditionally complex RPG (Baldur’s Gate 3)…
I think the sweet spot is finding a way to make tradition mechanics a bit more casual friendly without removing them outright. I don’t think Morrowind or Oblivion’s attribute and skill system was difficult to grasp, but the leveling system was pretty bad. You either played the way you wanted to, using the skills you believed your character should be using, and received low modifiers as a result, or you meticulously selected and planned out major/minor skills that weren’t reflective of your actual playstle, just so you wouldn’t blow your chance at earning +5 modifiers.
You couldn’t just comfortably advance to the next level. You had this paranoia that it would be a weak and wasted level-up because you didn’t spend enough time jumping or something. It poisoned the gameplay with this annoying meta that was purely about exploiting the leveling mechanics so you wouldn’t be at a huge disadvantage. They remedied this in Skyrim, but at the cost of making all characters feel generic. The heart was taken out of your character and who they were. You no longer had a class identity. Everything was just kind of same-ey.
If they could at least restore attribute points so I could give my character a deeper identity and allow more dialogue checks related to said attributes so these identities mattered, we’d be heading in the right direction. They don’t have to be so impactful that casual players are put off by them, but c’mon, man… I want to feel like there’s a deeper system at work here. I want to measure my character in more ways than “Good with sword” and “Good with heavy armor”.
Did I mention how much I miss skill checks too? Fallout 3 and New Vegas handled these superbly.
baldur’s gate was incredible at this. i think part of that was their mindset wasn’t “how do we make this more accessible to casual players?” they’re mindset was more “how do we make this less tedious and/or annoying for everyone?” like the quick select buffs ui that comes up with every roll. in early access, and other larian games it was still possible to add buffs mid dialogue, but you’d have to like ungroup the buffer, sit then outside, start the dialogue, then sneak them in to hit you with the buff, which might not work right if you already opened the roll interface…
they’ve even added a custom difficulty mode where you can turn off more of their ease of use features. for example, i personally believe the game is better with the “perception check failed” notifications removed. if your whole party fails the perception check, you still know the trap is there… it makes the whole mechanic a bit pointless at times. with it turned off you’ll still do the check, and it’ll still show you if you succeed, it just hides the rolls from you until then.
I’d really like to play that one. I sucked at BG1 and was never able to get very far without getting my ass handed to me by enemies. Maybe I needed to be better at D&D in general in order to properly execute fights. Either way, I hear I don’t actually need to play those two to pick up 3.
I agree with you but the silliness of the leveling system did have its own charm. As a kid I spent so much time jumping around and putting points into getting those athletics skills high enough that it became a bit game breaking.
There’s a certainly a balance somewhere in there but I don’t think the game was ever difficult enough, playing on medium difficulty, to feel like you’ve fallen too far behind the curve. For context I’m thinking mostly about oblivion.
I probably played through oblivion more times making builds that weren’t optimal and had weird stats than I did trying to min/max my attributes. I think, for me, leaving room for that kind of gameplay is part of what made the older games so special.
I disagree that they took the lesson that streamlining was the reason for Skyrim’s success, because Starfield is not streamlined in the least. It’s a complex series of menus and loading screens that lead to empty planets and probably other types of content, I’m not sure, because I hated navigating the menus and loading screens.
The lesson they should have taken from Skyrim is that the more immersive the game feels the more popular it will be. Immersion doesn’t require streamlining, and features like spellcrafting would be hugely welcome back for ES6, IMO.
But there’s no way to enjoy a space exploration game where the space exploration is handled so incredibly clunkily.
Very well said. Skyrim is incredibly immersive. Vanilla would be difficult for me to feel the same way about it I went back to it now, but with flora mods like Nature of the Wild Lands, grass mods, and environmental audio overhauls like Sounds of Skyrim, the game continues to draw me in like never before. I play the game much more slowly now, and spend more time walking and taking in the sights and sounds. I hope Bethesda can match this on their next title.
I love doing playthroughs where I don’t use fast travel at all. Especially with the mods that remove loading screens from cities and the mod that makes it so you experience the carriage rides between cities in realtime!
I think the number one rule of space exploration is “players must be able to fly wherever the fuck they want in their spaceship.” Their engine couldn’t handle that so they were hobbled from day one. All the design decisions were working back from that catastrophic mistake. They should have used Unreal or built a new engine or radically overhauled Gamebryo.
Basically give us a Morrowind clone with a better leveling system, remove the hit rolls, and updated visuals.
OH, and voice acting. Nit because it’s better than text, but because the writing on Morrowind was way too verbose. I don’t need to read a 30-page essay on the history of the history of a family whose servants once believed they spotted a mythical ring that culminate in a fetch quest.
I want the Morrowind levels of text, but let it be optional for those who want to delve into those branches of dialogue, and feel free to use splicing/AI to voice the extended options.
You speak to an NPC and it comes up with a few options like Skyrim, but included [More] at the bottom with far more topics.
TES books are the best, dude. I’m playing a (heavily modded but largely vanilla+) playthrough of Skyrim right now and just came across a large trove of tomes. I grab whatever I come across that I haven’t read while in dungeons or what have you, and at night when I return to my campsite (Campfire mod) I like to gather wood, roast a meal, and sit down to read through whatever literature I found that day. I have a stash sack full of some too for those nights where I’m feeling too wiped to really get into the game. I can just relax to the sound of crickets or morning birds and catch up on my lore.
New IP would have been fine if they didn’t drag Gamebryo’s corpse into it, as well as the worst part of Fallout 4’s perks, “+5% pistol damage at night” and adding requirements onto those like it made them special. Almost every RPG part of this game is bland and uninteresting and it’s so fucking unfortunate. Star Citizen might be taking a dozen years to complete but at least they’re using Unreal Engine and actually adding some fucking depth to their shit.
If they wanted to create something fresh then sure, but the end result was the same game they’ve released multiple times, except this time it’s with a new coat of paint.
They could’ve spent that time adding to an existing IP instead of creating a new IP to make the same thing again.
Yeah, also imagine waiting this long for the next elder scrolls and it was this quality. Now they have one more chance to get things right and apparently they needed it.
The game is pointless to return to. Base building has not point. There is no reason why anyone should even build a base. And the ship builder is cool, but it’s like a Lego, you can’t fly it.
This IP isn’t going to last a long time without that stuff.
To spoil it for anybody, Starfield has a “new game plus” where you carry over your character, stats, and inventory to a new universe (the new universe has new things).
But here’s the kicker:
That base and ship you spent all that time building? DISAPPEARS.
And the game encourages you to do NGs so there seriously is no reason to build.
This game is such a disappointment. Paused a bg3 game to test it. Did the tutorial rolling my eyes all the time. The first few missions hitting my head on the desk and finally, got back to Shadowheart.
I guess “lately” is relative considering that Fallout 76 has been out for awhile and had a disaster of a launch.
I say this as someone who is a huge Skyrim and fallout fan, but people need to realize that Bethesda might be dead soon and be absorbed into Microsoft.
Let me help wake you up to why. First, their games are developed incredibly slowly. This is showcased by Starfield really well. That game took 7 or 8 years to make and yet, it’s very unfinished. They cannot make games quickly. And clearly they’re being forced to. Fans will wait a long time, but when your franchise gives each generation one game to play, your goose is cooking. Not to mention the glacial pace means that Starfield screwed them big time.
This part is huge though: their tools are ancient and always have been. I know engines get reworked to fit new projects, it’s common in development. However, they haven’t invested at all in their engine and it shows big time. People were even saying it about FO4 how it ran very very poorly and couldn’t handle the cities at release. Everything in that engine was very similar to Skyrim so of course Starfield failed because it’s the same engine with little time spent upgrading it properly. In fact, that’s why the game sucks. They spent too much time on engine stuff and the project moved forward without content due to technical limitations.
Then all the minor stuff. Their PR sucks. FO76 was a scam and still has a subscription to it. Horse armor. Re-releasing games 3 times.
But that’s just the game studio. What about the publishing arm? Well, mostly fine except for Redfall. Seems the only thing they can manage sorta well is the Doom franchise. But my god what happened to Prey and why not have Prey 2?
In summary, Bethesda doesn’t appear to have it in them despite being a huge studio and I’m not looking forward to its future handling of TES6
Compare Starfield(330.7k > 9.2k) to games like Spiderman remaster(66.4k > 5.1k) or RE4(168k > 2.9k) or Armored Core 6(156.1k > 1.3k) or even a game build with multiplayer and replayability like Elden Ring(953.4k > 47.3k), all in 5 months timeframe, i think it’s to be expected as starfield didn’t launch with mod tools. The score doesn’t looks good tho, as people really don’t like the gameplay loop and the loading.
I wasn’t expecting anything groundbreaking to be honest, and I was fine with that. And yet, it still underdelivered.
The opening section where some hotshot explorer just GIVES you his organisation’s only ship and robot has to be the most idiotic and unbelievable moment in gaming narrative history (at least in my experience).
“Ok… Maybe it gets better.” I thought. It didn’t.
Most of the quests are just fucking awful and nonsensical - “Oh hi, I’m a top scientist for MAST, we have access to all the latest cutting edge technonology. Oh, apart from WiFi. Sorry can you go and pick up my sensors I placed nearby because I’m fucking lazy? Thanks.” Honestly, I had no words for this one, and it wasn’t the only one. Just laughably dogshit.
I had some good fun initially exploring and the ship customisation was cool, and I even enjoyed the space combat for a while, but the whole game feels like it was made 20 years ago.
That’s quite an accomplishment in a way I suppose.
The opening section where some hotshot explorer just GIVES you his organisation’s only ship and robot has to be the most idiotic and unbelievable moment in gaming narrative history (at least in my experience).
THANK YOU for calling this out. The story is the most hamfisted, milquetoast, bland, unbelievable lazy writing I’ve ever seen in a video game. Hey, you’re a random miner on her first day at work, here’s a ship and a secret society you’re supposed to be in. Welcome to the video game.
Hahah yes exactly. I know Beth isn’t highly regarded for writing/narrative but it makes Skyrim look like Shakespeare.
I actually thought Skyrim’s environmental storytelling was pretty good to be fair.
And yeah I think you called it with “lazy”. As a writer myself I actually found it almost offensive how utterly dogshit and low effort it was from a company that has the resources to do so much better.
I sincerely got the bends from basically alt-tabbing from the middle of Baldur’s Gate 3’s superlative storytelling straight into “OMG I’ve never seen someone generically mine a rock as good as you” and I had to turn it off (I eventually played it for about 10 hours, but I also initially installed it to a slow SSD and it was also unplayable aside from the garbage intro.)
Oooo! That’s the phrase I’ve been looking for for a few years. Yes! You know what game has amazing environmental storytelling? The MMO RPG Guild Wars 2. It’s typical high fantasy on the surface with its own unique style but the environment slowly unveils that it’s really a post-post-post apocalypse world. I enjoyed that aspect the most. Leaving typical big city fantasy hub to find yourself swimming thru radioactive waters covering a submerged skyscraper. So cool.
Kinda like Elfstones of Shannara book fiction turned out to be.
I think Bethesda, and really all other RPGs could benefit from being basically sandboxes without any real “main quest”.
Make it about me and what I want to be in this fantasy world. Not what lame ass story the writers shat out to meet deadlines.
Lore, not linear stories. World building and evironmental story telling, not a tiny fish bowl with little exploration.
I mean, the main quest is like 10 percent of the game and playtime for most players. The remaining 90 percent is exploring, side quests, meeting interesting people, and obtaining power and fame. All of which happen on account of the player and their own story they want to tell in the dev’s world.
Yep. Depends on the RPG and what you want to play to some extent - Baldurs Gate 3 shows just how good a well-written “traditional” branching narrative RPG can be for example.
When it comes to sandbox RPGs, I totally agree. Or at the very least keep the main story optional.
Have you played Kenshi? It does that really well I think.
Playing Starfield, and actually enjoying a good part of it, like the faction quests, side quests, radiant quests even, and the increased roleplaying potential, then seeing a huge backlash against it, made me replay Skyrim, Vanilla, in 2024. The results may shock you!
The TL;DR is that Skyirm only beats Starfield in world interactivity like NPC schedules, and the percentage of gameplay you interact with that’s hand-crafted vs procedural.
Comparing the faction quests of, say, the Dark Brotherhood and Crimson Fleet, you must play the Dark Brotherhood as a psycho assassin, while for the CF, you can be a fed, a brutal pirate, or someone walking that line, with your own background added for flavor.
The quest design in Starfield also gives more options, as well!
This overall means that, IMO, Bethesda game design itself is kind of shit without mods.
I don’t disagree. However, some of the absolute worst aspects of Bethesda games, like roleplaying mechanics, quest design, and more were actually improved in Starfield. BG3 still smokes it, same with New Vegas, but it’s also much better than Skyrim with those respects.
And because many of the sites you find on a planet are just RNG, there’s not much visual story-telling, either. Which is one the things they’ve always done pretty well until now. It’s just a place to find loot with no actual context or story behind it, which makes the exploration little more than “oh hey, there’s something here.”
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Wait. It didnt help that Bethesda argued against reviews that said the game isnt fun by arguing “Yes it is fun”?
I’m one of those people. I played as a “good guy,” played as a pirate, got to NG+10. I did every major quest line and most of the side quests.
I didn’t stop playing because I don’t like the game. I finished the game. Isn’t that normal?
I dunno. I finished Borderlands 3 years ago, and I still pick it up and play regularly. I’ve played the campaign through four times - once for each character.
Heck, I’d still be playing Destiny if it hadn’t gone to total shit with the focus on coop.
Long before that, I played the original God of War trilogy through multiple times, and it didn’t even have different character classes.
It’s not my bag, but there are people out there playing Skyrim for years. Hell, I fire up No Man’s Sky every so often, and I bought it on release when it was really rough.
It’s common for people to replay good games. I’m not even sure what the point of Starfield is - are they trying to be an MMORPG? If so, that huge of a player loss is a massive failure. If it’s not - why is it even online? Isn’t it supposed to be some massive, explorable universe with endless gaming possibilities?
Starfield isn’t online. It’s very much a single-player RPG. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think I have about 200 hours into it. The biggest problem is that while there is a vast galaxy to explore, there’s not much point. You can travel wherever you want, but unless you’re doing a mission, there’s not much to do once you get there. Walking around looking at plants and animals gets boring very quickly.
The way enemies scale with your skill level isn’t great, either. Maybe it’s how I spec’d my character, but at the higher levels, I am essentially invincible in person-to-person combat but ship-to-ship combat is exceptionally difficult.
It’s still one of my favorite games, but it doesn’t lend itself to replayability after a while.
I love Bethesda, but putting TES6 on the back burner to make Starfield for eight years was an idiotic decision. They also took the wrong lesson from Skyrim, believing that streamlining the game through stripping of features was the reason for its success. They’ve done this same with each successive game since, and each has been more poorly received than the last. Go back to your roots and make a good, deep Elder Scrolls game. Continue to leave the shitty +5 modifier leveling system out, but at the very least restore attributes and birthsigns. Restore spellmaking. STOP FUCKING IT UP. You’re on your last strike here and I don’t have a lot of faith that you’re going to make the right call.
I have a hard time believing they spent one year on this game, let alone eight. Half of it, including the game’s engine, the leveling system, and the fucking dragonshouts in space, is pulled from existing sources, the writing sucks, the base building is a pointless perk sink, there’s maybe three dozen unique structures copy-pasted again and again, the enemies are spongy and boring as hell, and despite being Bethesda’s “Least Buggy” work to date, it’s still chock-a-block with bugs.
You know what I think? I think they jerked around exactly like Randy Pitchford did with DNF and they’re trying to pretend they didn’t.
To play devil’s advocate, Starfield is absolutely a better RPG than Skyrim when it comes to roleplaying, quest design, and more. They made huge improvements to complexity and options for the player.
They just also paired that with awful world design, and could no longer rely on lore written by GOATs no longer working for the company.
I don’t even know, if I would normally truly agree that simplification isn’t at least aiding their mass appeal, but Starfield did get absolutely stumped by a traditionally complex RPG (Baldur’s Gate 3)…
I think the sweet spot is finding a way to make tradition mechanics a bit more casual friendly without removing them outright. I don’t think Morrowind or Oblivion’s attribute and skill system was difficult to grasp, but the leveling system was pretty bad. You either played the way you wanted to, using the skills you believed your character should be using, and received low modifiers as a result, or you meticulously selected and planned out major/minor skills that weren’t reflective of your actual playstle, just so you wouldn’t blow your chance at earning +5 modifiers.
You couldn’t just comfortably advance to the next level. You had this paranoia that it would be a weak and wasted level-up because you didn’t spend enough time jumping or something. It poisoned the gameplay with this annoying meta that was purely about exploiting the leveling mechanics so you wouldn’t be at a huge disadvantage. They remedied this in Skyrim, but at the cost of making all characters feel generic. The heart was taken out of your character and who they were. You no longer had a class identity. Everything was just kind of same-ey.
If they could at least restore attribute points so I could give my character a deeper identity and allow more dialogue checks related to said attributes so these identities mattered, we’d be heading in the right direction. They don’t have to be so impactful that casual players are put off by them, but c’mon, man… I want to feel like there’s a deeper system at work here. I want to measure my character in more ways than “Good with sword” and “Good with heavy armor”.
Did I mention how much I miss skill checks too? Fallout 3 and New Vegas handled these superbly.
baldur’s gate was incredible at this. i think part of that was their mindset wasn’t “how do we make this more accessible to casual players?” they’re mindset was more “how do we make this less tedious and/or annoying for everyone?” like the quick select buffs ui that comes up with every roll. in early access, and other larian games it was still possible to add buffs mid dialogue, but you’d have to like ungroup the buffer, sit then outside, start the dialogue, then sneak them in to hit you with the buff, which might not work right if you already opened the roll interface…
they’ve even added a custom difficulty mode where you can turn off more of their ease of use features. for example, i personally believe the game is better with the “perception check failed” notifications removed. if your whole party fails the perception check, you still know the trap is there… it makes the whole mechanic a bit pointless at times. with it turned off you’ll still do the check, and it’ll still show you if you succeed, it just hides the rolls from you until then.
I’d really like to play that one. I sucked at BG1 and was never able to get very far without getting my ass handed to me by enemies. Maybe I needed to be better at D&D in general in order to properly execute fights. Either way, I hear I don’t actually need to play those two to pick up 3.
BG3 is completely different to the original games. Think Fallout 3 compared to Fallout 2 levels of difference.
I agree with you but the silliness of the leveling system did have its own charm. As a kid I spent so much time jumping around and putting points into getting those athletics skills high enough that it became a bit game breaking.
There’s a certainly a balance somewhere in there but I don’t think the game was ever difficult enough, playing on medium difficulty, to feel like you’ve fallen too far behind the curve. For context I’m thinking mostly about oblivion.
I probably played through oblivion more times making builds that weren’t optimal and had weird stats than I did trying to min/max my attributes. I think, for me, leaving room for that kind of gameplay is part of what made the older games so special.
I disagree that they took the lesson that streamlining was the reason for Skyrim’s success, because Starfield is not streamlined in the least. It’s a complex series of menus and loading screens that lead to empty planets and probably other types of content, I’m not sure, because I hated navigating the menus and loading screens.
The lesson they should have taken from Skyrim is that the more immersive the game feels the more popular it will be. Immersion doesn’t require streamlining, and features like spellcrafting would be hugely welcome back for ES6, IMO.
But there’s no way to enjoy a space exploration game where the space exploration is handled so incredibly clunkily.
Very well said. Skyrim is incredibly immersive. Vanilla would be difficult for me to feel the same way about it I went back to it now, but with flora mods like Nature of the Wild Lands, grass mods, and environmental audio overhauls like Sounds of Skyrim, the game continues to draw me in like never before. I play the game much more slowly now, and spend more time walking and taking in the sights and sounds. I hope Bethesda can match this on their next title.
I love doing playthroughs where I don’t use fast travel at all. Especially with the mods that remove loading screens from cities and the mod that makes it so you experience the carriage rides between cities in realtime!
I think the number one rule of space exploration is “players must be able to fly wherever the fuck they want in their spaceship.” Their engine couldn’t handle that so they were hobbled from day one. All the design decisions were working back from that catastrophic mistake. They should have used Unreal or built a new engine or radically overhauled Gamebryo.
Let’s hope Starfield taught them the right lesson for TES6. I mean it won’t, but there’s a chance.
Basically give us a Morrowind clone with a better leveling system, remove the hit rolls, and updated visuals.
OH, and voice acting. Nit because it’s better than text, but because the writing on Morrowind was way too verbose. I don’t need to read a 30-page essay on the history of the history of a family whose servants once believed they spotted a mythical ring that culminate in a fetch quest.
I’d kill for a Daggerfall remake. That was my first TES experience and I still remember staying up all night to play it in highschool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXOWKABmxCQ
Theres never been a more perfect time! This project recently reached 1.0 converting it over to Unity and is supported by mods!
That’s Awesome! Thank you!
I want the Morrowind levels of text, but let it be optional for those who want to delve into those branches of dialogue, and feel free to use splicing/AI to voice the extended options.
You speak to an NPC and it comes up with a few options like Skyrim, but included [More] at the bottom with far more topics.
That works too. I loved diving through books and stuff, but sometimes the quest dialogs just got too wordy.
TES books are the best, dude. I’m playing a (heavily modded but largely vanilla+) playthrough of Skyrim right now and just came across a large trove of tomes. I grab whatever I come across that I haven’t read while in dungeons or what have you, and at night when I return to my campsite (Campfire mod) I like to gather wood, roast a meal, and sit down to read through whatever literature I found that day. I have a stash sack full of some too for those nights where I’m feeling too wiped to really get into the game. I can just relax to the sound of crickets or morning birds and catch up on my lore.
Hard disagree that taking the chance on a new IP was a bad call. It didn’t work out, but more of the same thing forever would be worse.
New IP would have been fine if they didn’t drag Gamebryo’s corpse into it, as well as the worst part of Fallout 4’s perks, “+5% pistol damage at night” and adding requirements onto those like it made them special. Almost every RPG part of this game is bland and uninteresting and it’s so fucking unfortunate. Star Citizen might be taking a dozen years to complete but at least they’re using Unreal Engine and actually adding some fucking depth to their shit.
Did Star Citizen change engine? I thought they used a modified CryEngine. Just checked, they now use Lumberyard, which is based on CryEngine.
Wait, really? I would have bet real money on it being UE4. Whelp, my mistake.
I’m pretty sure UE4 wasn’t even close to being released when Star Citizen started, and changing engine is a good way of wasting a lot of time.
UE4 released in 2014 and Star Citizen started releasing modules in 2013, so pretty close actually.
If they wanted to create something fresh then sure, but the end result was the same game they’ve released multiple times, except this time it’s with a new coat of paint.
They could’ve spent that time adding to an existing IP instead of creating a new IP to make the same thing again.
Yeah, also imagine waiting this long for the next elder scrolls and it was this quality. Now they have one more chance to get things right and apparently they needed it.
The game is pointless to return to. Base building has not point. There is no reason why anyone should even build a base. And the ship builder is cool, but it’s like a Lego, you can’t fly it.
This IP isn’t going to last a long time without that stuff.
To spoil it for anybody, Starfield has a “new game plus” where you carry over your character, stats, and inventory to a new universe (the new universe has new things).
But here’s the kicker:
That base and ship you spent all that time building? DISAPPEARS.
And the game encourages you to do NGs so there seriously is no reason to build.
This game is such a disappointment. Paused a bg3 game to test it. Did the tutorial rolling my eyes all the time. The first few missions hitting my head on the desk and finally, got back to Shadowheart.
It felt soooooo empty. So shallow.
It lost me after 20-something hours sometime during the week after release. What a pile of shit
For contrast, 24 hour peak for BGS game since skyrim
Skyrim base + special edition = 28.5k
Fallout 4 = 18k
Fallout 76 = 8.3k
Starfield = 9.2k
Starfield + fallout 76 can’t even surpass Fallout 4. They sure is losing the plot lately.
I guess “lately” is relative considering that Fallout 76 has been out for awhile and had a disaster of a launch.
I say this as someone who is a huge Skyrim and fallout fan, but people need to realize that Bethesda might be dead soon and be absorbed into Microsoft.
Let me help wake you up to why. First, their games are developed incredibly slowly. This is showcased by Starfield really well. That game took 7 or 8 years to make and yet, it’s very unfinished. They cannot make games quickly. And clearly they’re being forced to. Fans will wait a long time, but when your franchise gives each generation one game to play, your goose is cooking. Not to mention the glacial pace means that Starfield screwed them big time.
This part is huge though: their tools are ancient and always have been. I know engines get reworked to fit new projects, it’s common in development. However, they haven’t invested at all in their engine and it shows big time. People were even saying it about FO4 how it ran very very poorly and couldn’t handle the cities at release. Everything in that engine was very similar to Skyrim so of course Starfield failed because it’s the same engine with little time spent upgrading it properly. In fact, that’s why the game sucks. They spent too much time on engine stuff and the project moved forward without content due to technical limitations.
Then all the minor stuff. Their PR sucks. FO76 was a scam and still has a subscription to it. Horse armor. Re-releasing games 3 times.
But that’s just the game studio. What about the publishing arm? Well, mostly fine except for Redfall. Seems the only thing they can manage sorta well is the Doom franchise. But my god what happened to Prey and why not have Prey 2?
In summary, Bethesda doesn’t appear to have it in them despite being a huge studio and I’m not looking forward to its future handling of TES6
If enough people already bought it, I doubt they care.
The thing is they’re still milking Skyrim over a decade later. They wanted the same for Starfield.
Ohh they should, the sales doesn’t look too good.
I don’t think it sold nearly as much as they hoped.
But yeah, it probably made back what was spent on it’s making. And a bit more.
But as I understood it, they imagined it being their “Next Skyrim” in terms of success. And it’s nowhere near that.
Starfield is a made by committee game. It was destined to be bad.
That is a stark insult. But it may be true.
Damn it, “losing steam” was right there to make a great headline pun
The state of journalism today… smh
Steaming my hams?
Strokin’ my hog?
deleted by creator
How does that look for other singleplayer games that take some 50-100 hours to beat?
Compare Starfield(330.7k > 9.2k) to games like Spiderman remaster(66.4k > 5.1k) or RE4(168k > 2.9k) or Armored Core 6(156.1k > 1.3k) or even a game build with multiplayer and replayability like Elden Ring(953.4k > 47.3k), all in 5 months timeframe, i think it’s to be expected as starfield didn’t launch with mod tools. The score doesn’t looks good tho, as people really don’t like the gameplay loop and the loading.
Copied from above comment:
Skyrim base + special edition = 28.5k
Fallout 4 = 18k
Fallout 76 = 8.3k
Starfield = 9.2k
Thanks. I meant how many percent they lost after 6 months.
Lol
I wasn’t expecting anything groundbreaking to be honest, and I was fine with that. And yet, it still underdelivered.
The opening section where some hotshot explorer just GIVES you his organisation’s only ship and robot has to be the most idiotic and unbelievable moment in gaming narrative history (at least in my experience).
“Ok… Maybe it gets better.” I thought. It didn’t.
Most of the quests are just fucking awful and nonsensical - “Oh hi, I’m a top scientist for MAST, we have access to all the latest cutting edge technonology. Oh, apart from WiFi. Sorry can you go and pick up my sensors I placed nearby because I’m fucking lazy? Thanks.” Honestly, I had no words for this one, and it wasn’t the only one. Just laughably dogshit.
I had some good fun initially exploring and the ship customisation was cool, and I even enjoyed the space combat for a while, but the whole game feels like it was made 20 years ago.
That’s quite an accomplishment in a way I suppose.
I don’t think even modding can save it.
THANK YOU for calling this out. The story is the most hamfisted, milquetoast, bland, unbelievable lazy writing I’ve ever seen in a video game. Hey, you’re a random miner on her first day at work, here’s a ship and a secret society you’re supposed to be in. Welcome to the video game.
Fuck off.
Hahah yes exactly. I know Beth isn’t highly regarded for writing/narrative but it makes Skyrim look like Shakespeare.
I actually thought Skyrim’s environmental storytelling was pretty good to be fair.
And yeah I think you called it with “lazy”. As a writer myself I actually found it almost offensive how utterly dogshit and low effort it was from a company that has the resources to do so much better.
I sincerely got the bends from basically alt-tabbing from the middle of Baldur’s Gate 3’s superlative storytelling straight into “OMG I’ve never seen someone generically mine a rock as good as you” and I had to turn it off (I eventually played it for about 10 hours, but I also initially installed it to a slow SSD and it was also unplayable aside from the garbage intro.)
Oooo! That’s the phrase I’ve been looking for for a few years. Yes! You know what game has amazing environmental storytelling? The MMO RPG Guild Wars 2. It’s typical high fantasy on the surface with its own unique style but the environment slowly unveils that it’s really a post-post-post apocalypse world. I enjoyed that aspect the most. Leaving typical big city fantasy hub to find yourself swimming thru radioactive waters covering a submerged skyscraper. So cool.
Kinda like Elfstones of Shannara book fiction turned out to be.
I think Bethesda, and really all other RPGs could benefit from being basically sandboxes without any real “main quest”.
Make it about me and what I want to be in this fantasy world. Not what lame ass story the writers shat out to meet deadlines.
Lore, not linear stories. World building and evironmental story telling, not a tiny fish bowl with little exploration.
I mean, the main quest is like 10 percent of the game and playtime for most players. The remaining 90 percent is exploring, side quests, meeting interesting people, and obtaining power and fame. All of which happen on account of the player and their own story they want to tell in the dev’s world.
Yep. Depends on the RPG and what you want to play to some extent - Baldurs Gate 3 shows just how good a well-written “traditional” branching narrative RPG can be for example.
When it comes to sandbox RPGs, I totally agree. Or at the very least keep the main story optional.
Have you played Kenshi? It does that really well I think.
That game was dead on arrival for me, everything from gameplay to story was absolutely outdated and not interesting.
same. i really tried to like, but after ten hours i just uninstalled it.
Same. Played for 40 hours, did the ranger questline, went “is thats it?” And basically felt no urge to play again.
Playing Starfield, and actually enjoying a good part of it, like the faction quests, side quests, radiant quests even, and the increased roleplaying potential, then seeing a huge backlash against it, made me replay Skyrim, Vanilla, in 2024. The results may shock you!
The TL;DR is that Skyirm only beats Starfield in world interactivity like NPC schedules, and the percentage of gameplay you interact with that’s hand-crafted vs procedural.
Comparing the faction quests of, say, the Dark Brotherhood and Crimson Fleet, you must play the Dark Brotherhood as a psycho assassin, while for the CF, you can be a fed, a brutal pirate, or someone walking that line, with your own background added for flavor.
The quest design in Starfield also gives more options, as well!
This overall means that, IMO, Bethesda game design itself is kind of shit without mods.
World interactivity is one of the most important things in open world games. Starfield is just completely empty
I don’t disagree. However, some of the absolute worst aspects of Bethesda games, like roleplaying mechanics, quest design, and more were actually improved in Starfield. BG3 still smokes it, same with New Vegas, but it’s also much better than Skyrim with those respects.
That’s why it’s interesting.
And because many of the sites you find on a planet are just RNG, there’s not much visual story-telling, either. Which is one the things they’ve always done pretty well until now. It’s just a place to find loot with no actual context or story behind it, which makes the exploration little more than “oh hey, there’s something here.”
yeah i miss the lore and sense of world building i get in Fallout. every little note adds to the story and overall feel
Doesn’t matter because Bethesda still got their money.