deleted by creator
I mean, I wouldn’t put Starfield in the same family as Diablo IV, with most of the game behind a microtransaction wall. Bethesda promised Skyrim in Space. We got Skyrim in Space. Skyrim is a polarizing game (much like Witcher 3 is, often for opposite people/reasons).
I don’t think Starfield is “not so bad”, I’m having the best gaming experience I’ve had in a year or two. I think all the critiques are valid, but I don’t really care about most of them.
So why should I play a game I don’t enjoy to punish the makers of the game I do enjoy? I have a very limited amount of gaming time. It gets the game I’m having the most fun with.
I feel like I’m in some sort of fugue state with everyone comparing this to Skyrim. In what way is this like Skyrim? Skyrim, for all its flaws, at least had hand crafted worlds with interesting things to see and do in them. From what I’ve seen of Starfield, that has been completely replaced by procedurally generated barren worlds. Like yeah, you can ‘explore’ them, but for what? What is there even to find?
Skyrim, for all its flaws, at least had hand crafted worlds with interesting things to see and do in them
Virtually 100% of main and faction story arcs are hand-generated content. I would go further and say Starfield used more distinct model-sets than Skyrim did.
For context, Skyrim’s map was ALSO procedurally generated, but most (or all) of the content was built on top of it by hand. We have comparable amount of manually generated content in Starfield, and then tons of procedural content allowing for a larger overall world.
Starfield is approximately 100,000x larger than Skyrim. So yeah, a lot of it is going to be procedurally generated. But you follow a general path, and everything along that path is NOT.
So… no fugue there. Both have similar amounts of handmade content, but Skyrim has a lot of filler content, and that filler content is largely barrel worlds, something that works because planets tend to be barren.
What part of Diablo 4 is behind a microtransaction wall? Some skins?
The problem with both games is they disrespect the player’s time by turning everything into a slog.
That’s way more of an issue with modern game design trying to maximize hours played while minimizing actual content than paid skins. Those may suck, but to be fair it was Bethesda who introduced the damn thing in the first place. I’d rather pretend the premium skins don’t exist but have a fun game than have no microtransactions and a boring 150+ hours of empty world with a total of 35 hours of interesting beats.
What part of Diablo 4 is behind a microtransaction wall? Some skins?
I think it’s “Most of the skins”.
The problem with both games is they disrespect the player’s time by turning everything into a slog.
I can’t speak for Diablo 4 on this, but that’s not Starfield. Just like other Bethesda games, Starfield clearly gives feedback when you’re leaving major storylines and running procedural content. Radiant Quests have mixed reception, but the number of radiant quests you actually need to complete any Bethesda game is in the single-digits.
If you stick to main-story and faction-mainline quests, you touch virtually nothing that wasn’t hand-crafted for your pleasure. No slog. No grind. No nothing. And I find it pretty easy to differentiate between the handcrafted side-quests and the procedural side-quests. If you don’t, just ignore the more obscure-seeming side quests anyway.
a boring 150+ hours of empty world with a total of 35 hours of interesting beats
Is this a personal self-discipline problem of yours? A game with 35 hours of great content is worth the price of a game like Starfield, and you can just NOT go out and play the “150+ hours of empty world” if you don’t like it. While I haven’t beaten Starfield yet (I like procedural content and spend a lot of time in it), that mainline content isn’t gated behind doing procedural stuff. That stuff was added on top of the content you directly pay for.
For me, I love going system to system finding ships to pirate. I haven’t really gotten into planetary exploration yet. Maybe I won’t enjoy that as much, or maybe I will. If I don’t enjoy it, I just won’t do it and it won’t detract from the game.
Really? 35 hours of great content?
Exactly what parts of Starfield struck you as great?
I’ll agree that around the 30 hours mark of my playthrough I was thinking the game felt big and expensive and was excited to spend more time in that universe.
But it wasn’t long after that even the faction quests ended up just so repetitive in scope and even level design that I was over it.
The number of loading screens just to go from point A to B for a fetch quest is probably the worst of any open world game…ever.
It’s like they finally had SSD tech so they just decided to throw any concern over loading out the window in game design.
The story is mediocre, the voice acting is meh, the gameplay loops are extremely repetitive.
The thing you like is the one thing I also enjoyed of ship combat with boarding enemy ships. That was done well, outside of the fact you can’t physically go outside your ship.
And “you can play 35 hours without hating it” as the barometer of whether a game is satisfactory sells yourself and your time short. You as a consumer deserve more, and making excuses for outdated and poor game design doesn’t do yourself any favors. Legitimate complaints about games getting their fair amount of attention leads to better games, as happened with games like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk. The only way Bethesda’s game devs are going to get the appropriate resources from management to focus on making a game that doesn’t waste your time with repetition on the next one is if there’re enough complaints about the repetition in this one that management is concerned about repeating bad press which might impact sales.
You do yourself and the devs disservice minimizing or dismissing complaints and only do the execs a favor.
That’s great if you don’t feel that way. I’m guessing that as you put more hours in the title you’ll feel different, but hope that’s not the case and your enthusiasm remains. But for many players that were quite excited for the game, it ended up being rather disappointing.
Really? 35 hours of great content?
Exactly what parts of Starfield struck you as great?
The major city locations. The major factions/plots. But specifically, I was referring to the approximate amount of hand-made content from previous research. If you don’t think handmade Bethesda content is great, well obviously don’t buy it like I wouldn’t buy another Witcher title.
The number of loading screens just to go from point A to B for a fetch quest is probably the worst of any open world game…ever.
Not my experience. It’s worse than any seamless game, but I found the loading screens and loading times to be pretty reasonable compared to other games. Specifically, I noted that loading times were shorter. And as much as people bitched about the “sequence” loading screens, they’re a whole lot nicer than the black-screen-with-image I was used to in the past.
The story is mediocre, the voice acting is meh, the gameplay loops are extremely repetitive.
Now you’re going full-subjective. As my college English professor used to remind us, “I didn’t like it” is not a real metric for quality. I don’t agree the story is mediocre. I don’t agree the voice acting is meh. And I don’t agree the “gameplay loops” are repetitive. Unless you choose to stick with the intentionally repetitive content.
And “you can play 35 hours without hating it” as the barometer of whether a game is satisfactory sells yourself and your time short
Actually, my metric was “35 hours of GREAT non-procedural content”. YOUR metric is 35 hours without hating it. It may help to remind you that I also enjoy the procedural content. But a lot of people are whining that the whole game is procedural, despite having comparable hand-made content to any other Bethesda game.
If you don’t like Bethesda games, you shouldn’t be complaining about Starfield, the same way I don’t complain about some fancy wine sucking (I don’t enjoy wine). If you DO like Bethesda games, your critiques above probably apply to them more than Starfield. Same issue. This is a good “wine” for people who like “wine”.
You do yourself and the devs disservice minimizing or dismissing complaints and only do the execs a favor.
I’m doing myself and devs a disservice by loving a game because it’s the game I was looking for and the game I was promised? Do you even hear yourself? When I have a hankering for Whiskey, if someone puts a glass of Macallan 25 in front of me, I’m not going to bitch. I’m going to enjoy it. No matter who I’m doing a disservice because it’s not a Budweiser
I dunno why you’re getting downvoted, cause you’re completely right. The microtransaction hell in Diablo is all for shit like horse armor. The game plays exactly the same whether or not you’ve spent an extra dime. With that being said, it is 100% bullshit to have any extra transactions, micro or not, in a $90 game.
He’s getting downvoted because despite everything you said, the valid complaints about Diablo 4 are not similar to complaints about Starfield.
It’s not the “Diablo 4 microtransactions for skins is OK” (which I disagree with) that got him downvoted, it’s “both games disrespect the player’s time”.
Why can’t we have both and the people who want to play each type of game enjoy what they like.
I personally haven’t found SF or D4 to be a slog. D4 remained fun for me though the story and clearing the map which took me up to lv60 and then I put it down to pick up again later, SF is a long game but I haven’t felt like I’ve had to grind or repeat content to keep up, everything I’ve done is a bespoke quest and that’s given me enough experience and cash to level up what I want and buy a top level ship, etc
If you don’t like long games you may well find those games a slog but then you have games like the new Assassin Creed focused at people who want shorter games.
Why can’t we have both and the people who want to play each type of game enjoy what they like.
We can. But they’re different. I have a problem with microtransaction-driven games, even if it’s skins. I won’t fault you if you like D4, but D4 is the first (second if you count the mobile shit) Diablo game that I haven’t put 100 hours into, or even played. The complaint about microtransactions is valid and objective however, and there have been criticisms on cosmetic-microtransactions for almost a decade now. It’s not a feature by any stretch of the imagination, and nobody who plays the game seriously prefers “$25 armor set” to “customizable armor set”
Nobody “has to enjoy” Starfield. But the topic of the hour is whether Starfield was overhyped or (imo) whether Starfield is a valid target for the kind of criticism that came up when BG3 came out and other game studies complained it was too well-polished.
There are objective complaints and subjective ones. I don’t care about the subjective ones. You don’t want base-builders, so be it. You don’t want procedural quests, whatever. Sometimes I play games with a playtime of 30 minutes because I don’t want a long game. But Starfield was not misleadingly advertised or a bug-riddled mess. We got Skyrim in Space, and that’s what we were promised.
That’s a breath of fresh air. I’d appreciate that even if I didn’t want to play Skyrim in Space. If someone comes out with a game and says “It’s just like Witcher 3”, I’ll thank them and never touch it. I won’t fault the game for being like another popular game I happen to hate.
I only brought up D4 here because people are saying Starfield is “just like D4”
Ok, I make you right on the MTX in Diablo and I’ll never engage with the season passes or paid skins myself.
deleted by creator
the case that it was overhyped and made people buy it before anyone knew they were being taken for a ride
I’m still waiting. I’m not the only one. We keep asking for a list of things that were hyped about Starfield that we’re missing, and so far that list is exactly zero items long. Most of the things people are bitching about, I would have told them 2+ years ago Starfield wasn’t going to have, and nobody ever promised.
Further, how are we “taken for a ride”? I’ve spent $20 on Starfield so far (Xbox game pass) and have had nothing but a fucking blast. Are they secretly screwing me by making me enjoy it?
I’m going to reiterate what I said elsewhere. To my understanding, Bethesda promised me Skyrim in Space. When Starfield came out, Bethesda delivered Skyrim in Space. What exactly is fraudulent or misleading about any of that? I’m sorry if you expected Minecraft in Space or No Man’s Sky 2. But nobody ever said this would be that.
deleted by creator
Oh maybe those who didn’t like it far whatever reason accept that things are subjective and their experience is not universal. Plenty of people have enjoyed this game and found things to like even if it’s not perfect. You don’t like it, that’s also a valid point of view, but you can’t dictate to other people that they also shouldn’t enjoy it.
deleted by creator
Because a lot of gamers don’t feel fooled. They expected a Bethesda game and got a Bethesda game for all the good and ill that entails.
You’re entitled to dislike the game, but complaining that it’s not something else is silly. It’s like the people who complain about a lack of easy mode in Dark Souls. Sometimes a game isn’t for you and it’s ok to move on and play something else, but trying to convince other people they’re wrong for enjoying it is a fools errand.
They expected a Bethesda game and got a Bethesda game for all the good and I’ll that entails.
That’s also all we were promised. No false advertising here. Bethesda knows what Bethesda fans want, and they make the game Bethesda fans want. It’s literally the only gaming experience left where I don’t feel like I have to over-research and pirate-demo to figure out if I should buy a game.
Yeah, I was willing to concede with Cyberpunk that although it was a good game on PC/Next Gen from day one, it had a lot of issues on the formats most people own, and CDPR had overpromised the level of detail and systems in the city.
However I can’t recall anywhere where Todd, Bethesda or MS promised stuff more than “Bethesda RPG, but in space”.
Yeah. But I love that about CP. I got it dirt cheap when everyone was bitching, and just waited for them to fix it before I started playing. Best $17 I ever spent for a new AAA game! I can be patient.
deleted by creator
thousands of planets to explore would imply exploration is going to be exciting I’d personally assume
They also said that most of them would be desolate and procedurely generated. They never promised a thousend hand crafted planets.
I always find it funny that Hello Games over promised and the backlash was such that GOG extended its refund policy, but Bethesda does the same thing every time they release a game and gamers just call it a Bethesda game and that’s the end of it or “modders will fix it”…
What did Starfield overpromise that we didn’t get? As far as I can tell, we got exactly what we expected - Skyrim in Space.
Take my money, Bethesda, and give me more Skyrim in Space please.
deleted by creator
Bethesda promised Skyrim in space and that’s what we got, a game exactly like the one they released 12 years ago but in space. They should have just called it Skyrim: Space Edition.
i don’t entirely agree with that statement about it being identical to a 12-year-old Skyrim. But if it were true, what’s the problem? This whole “bleeding edge stupidity” thing was the first reason we all started to hate AAA games 20 years ago.
Maybe you’re too young, but “can it handle Farcry” was an insult to AAA. Now if it doesn’t use every graphics acronym under the sun at once, and have multi-phased smell reflection when you walk into the bathrooms, then it’s shit.
Also, for the record, a 2014 Engine (UE4) remained the top engine for basically anyone to make games in until last April. Improvements in graphics have slowed down because we’re getting closer and closer to the limit.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I get it for “free” because I sub to xbox service. I’d have paid $70 for it, though. As for time, I could have spent it in other games, but it’s the first really fun gaming experience I’ve had in quite a while.
It’s easy to make accusations against Bethesda fans like this, but they’re unfalsifiable. You could make the same accusations of people enjoying any other game and there’s nothing they could do to prove they actually enjoy the game. Except that they DO actually enjoy the game.
I’ve played about 20 games this year. If I had to pick only 1 to play (which isn’t far from the truth anymore with my second job), it would be Starfield. And you might be surprised at the names of games that rank below it on the list. Like Elden Ring (which I will never touch again after my cheat-easy-mode run), Hitman WoA, etc. Maybe I won’t be playing it in a year, or two years. Maybe I will.
I think it’s interesting you brought up Souls Games. Quite literally your first paragraph, I feel about them. I have 100% buyer’s remorse about Bloodborne, and lesser buyer’s remorse about Elden Ring. Neither will I ever touch again. To some extent, I kept trying to convince myself the story is worth their unwillingness to give gamers the controls that would actually make the game fun… and I gave up trying to have fun playing it.
You can throw as many buzzwords at it as you like, but that doesn’t diminish the lived experience of people who had fun with the game. Why are you so insistent on convincing people they didn’t enjoy it? There must be a buzzword for that mindset too.
deleted by creator
What about the people who played it on Game Pass and still enjoyed it.
Huh? Starfield is the best RPG Bethesda has made since Morrowind, because it’s an actual RPG. It has the best quest design since Oblivion, with almost none of the quests boiling down to “Go there, kill guys”, but actually needing to talk to people, pay attention to the environment, interact with the world and make choices (and your Background, Traits, Skills and faction membership all add new ways for you to go about a quest.) The weapon design is an incredible improvement over Fallout 4. Almost everything in Starfield is either a massive step up or a return to form compared to their previous work and you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.
And that’s not even to mention things like the ship building system, which is genuinely extremely impressive.
We must be playing different games. Every storyline quest I’ve done has been:
- Go to this random place
- Gun down everyone in sight because my mandatory companion can’t stealth.
- Talk to the named bad guy.
- See if I win a coin flip. 4a. Walk out with a McGuffin. 4b. Gun everyone down again, then walk out with the McGuffin.
It’s nothing but, “Go there, kill guys,” as you call it. Everything is a fetch quest with faceless mooks between me and whatever fifth turn I need to take to get to the end of the corridors in the space dungeon.
And comparing the game to Morrowind is laughable. Morrowind was an amazing feat of world building based on actual player choice. Starfield is a bunch of boxes to tick to see the next space cliche.
To me this reads like you havent done the Ryujin plotline which has a lot of stealth involved, and the UC/Crimson Fleet one that has some detective work/stealth
You’re absolutely right and if I can muster up the energy to start the game back up then Ryujin is probably going to be my first stop.
You’re expected not to kill anyone during the entire Ryujin storyline as it’s “bad for business”. It’s all social and sneaky stealth.
The Ryujin quest line could be done by running straight through it.
Stealth in the game is an absolute joke.
Half the damn quests don’t even require me to leave the city they started in. Maybe you just had bad luck picking all of the quests that are like that and none of the others and I had the opposite. Or maybe you did 3 quests and are talking out of your ass. I don’t know, I wasn’t there when you played the game. I mean, did you even do anything other than main story? Join a faction, do sidequests, anything? Because I could point you to half a dozen quests just in early game New Atlantis that are entirely reliant on dialogue, choices etc. without any killing and that do not give you a mandatory companion. Like, do the UC Security quests, investigate the brownouts in the well, talk to the preacher guy, the art guy in Jemison Mercantile, the collector guys in Terrabrew, the bartender at Viewport, the scientist by the tree. The game will literally put half of these quests in the quest log from ambient dialogue, and the other half you get from just engaging with the world and talking to NPCs in the first city you visit. It’s not like these are incredibly hidden quests you have to go out of your way to find. Hell, when you go to Akila the game just plops a hostage negotiation right in your face. I mean, come on, you’re either being wilfully disingenuous or you played that game blind as a bat.
And if you don’t believe me and don’t want to bother playing the game yourself again, just look at the playthrough of somebody like Many A True Nerd. He did a lot of the quests I just mentioned.
I’m curious, you mentioned the hostage scenario at Akila. Does talking down the Shaw gang give you a peaceful method of obtain the artifact near the end of that quest? I try not to save scum so when that whole ordeal went south I had to gun my way through everyone outside of the cavern, then of course only after half her people were dead did Shaw bother striking up a conversation. Not trying to be an ass here, I’m genuinely curious as to whether or not that would’ve actually changed with prior gameplay.
I tried a few side quests and none of them were at all compelling, though I’ll admit I didn’t bother going too deep with most of the factions. I don’t know, each one I tried consisted of walking back and forth and listening to people talk about trees being too loud or some shit I couldn’t care about. Maybe if I’d gone to Space Tokyo or signed up with the space pirates that would’ve been different. But following the main storyline and tooling around the first few planets was repetitive and just more Bethesda-style gun in, then take the shortcut out after getting the thing. I gave up on the game after around 20 hours of not enjoying the experience.
If you’re liking the game then good for you but my experience was that none of the choices I made actually mattered and the world Bethesda built was bland and cliche. And the game mechanics themselves were nothing ground breaking at all, except maybe ship building but that took way too much effort to grok. I tried to like the game but couldn’t.
I don’t know. I didn’t manage to talk them down on my first playthrough, so who knows, but I don’t think so. But I also don’t think every game or even every RPG needs to be designed with a complete pacifist route in mind. The Shaw Gang mission is also about the only one I can think of that actually fits completely with the “formula” you described, outside of maybe the tutorial.
Also, yeah, Space Pirates might actually be a quest for you, or rather being an undercover agent in the space pirates. You just get straight up thrown out of UC SysDef and have them as your enemy if you run and gun those missions, so you have to sneaky, use your persuasion and actually look around your environments if you want to stay with the good guy faction. The part on the cruise ship is especially good for this. Your choices there definitely matter in that regard.
Maybe it’s just a game for people that are really into space in a specific way. Like, sometimes I’ll just look at pictures of the surface of Venus or Mars and think about the fact that there’s billions of these worlds just existing with no observer. Just rocks, dust, storms, rain, volcanoes, all types of things being there and happening, even though no one can see it.
I’m not them, but yes you can talk you way through that encounter not firing a single shot and still get the artifact. Many quests are like that.
my mandatory companion can’t stealth
So tell your mandatory companion to “wait here” when you plan to Stealth Archer. Or give her a chameleon suit. Ironically, the “stealth archer” meme is the most valid critique of Bethesda games, and you’re complaining because it isn’t working well for you.
Plenty of people have enjoyed this game and found things to like even if it’s not perfect.
“People enjoy the slop so the slop must not be that bad.”
but you can’t dictate to other people that they also shouldn’t enjoy it.
Yes but we can absolutely point out they’re enjoying slop and are probably the biggest contribution to mainstream games becoming more and more soulless slop.
“I’m Mr High and Mighty, upon my golden gaming chair. I only sample the finest 10/10 works of art and have no time for lowly 7/10 slop that the peasents enjoy. If only they’d accept that I know better what they should be allowed to enjoy”
That’s you that is.
deleted by creator
I only sample the finest 10/10 works of art
No? I’ll admit that something like Enderal: Forgetten Stories, while very fun and better than Skyrim in a lot of ways, is still like an 8/10 even though I like it a lot. If we’re going on the game alone and not how great and generous the developers are to the community, Deep Rock Galactic is a 9/10.
have no time for lowly 7/10 slop that the peasents enjoy.
7/10 for Starfield is incredibly generous. It’s a 5/10 if we’re all being honest and not circlejerking about Bethesda.
If only they’d accept that I know better what they should be allowed to enjoy
You can like and play whatever you want.
But if you share the opinion that overall quality of games, especially triple A titles, has gone down in the past 10-15 years, and you can sit here and give Starfield: Yet Another Wide as an Ocean but Deep as a Puddle + Boring Experience from Bethesda ™️ is a 7/10; I don’t think you really have the right to complain about the declining quality of video games when you’re essentially contributing to it by claiming incredibly mediocre games are above average.
If you feel good that you paid $70-100 for what’s really feels like a $40 barely out of early-access game, hey, I can’t change your mind.
My opinion is fact and everyone else is wrong. I also watch a million essays over the decline of gaming on YouTube so I am very informed.
deleted by creator
what I find more wild is as usual the toxic gaming community can’t handle opinions. I like the game, I don’t care if others don’t, but acting like I don’t have “standards” cause you don’t like it is rediculous. Likewise, I got bored so fast of baulders gate 3 but apparently it’s the second coming of christ and I must be wrong. No, I get why people love it, it just wasn’t my jam. Starfield is
its so depressing that people still seethe this much over others liking a game they didnt
This entire thread is hilarious. I’ve been paying for therapy like a sucker, I didn’t know you could get infinite amounts of free psychoanalysis just by suggesting that Starfield is somewhat underwhelming.
The amount of gaslighting I’ve seen gamers do to themselves over this game has been wild. “Is it me? Maybe I’m the problem. Maybe I just don’t like games anymore?”
They’d rather do that than admit that a Bethesda game kinda sucks. And if you say it’s not good, people will come after you. The super Bethesda defenders keep claiming the game is getting review bombed, but from what I’ve seen it’s the other way around. If you say something negative about it, people will jump on your case. I’ve seen so many streamers and YouTubers try and cover their asses when trying to speak critically about this game to keep the Todd brigade from forming a mob in their comment sections.
It’s been such a wild game release.
Starfield fans are vicious. I got called mentally ill, incel, shit like that because I call out their loading screen simulator.
‘loading screen simulator’ lol I love this, imma use it
deleted by creator
Yeah, it’s pretty underhwelming. There’s a lot of people who claim Starfield is a “great Bethesda game” but “people hyped it up too much.” In my opinion, it’s a terrible Bethesda game. The best thing those games do right is you can set off in a direction and along the way, find a world full of little things. Landmarks, unique little stories, side quests, and even just interesting items to grab. Starfield dropped all of this in favor of incredibly generic proc gen planets that have the same couple of outposts you’ll see on every planet. Like THE SAME. The interiors are THE SAME. Every safe, dead body, message log is THE SAME.
It lacks the one thing that brought me back to Bethesda games despite all their flaws.
God, I couldn’t put my finger on why I didn’t like it. I was just so bored, even with the exploration which I normally love. All of the fun parts of FO4 and Skyrim are missing. Just walking around and enjoying the world is completely missing, replaced by a pretty shitty space travel mechanic.
Fast travel to space, then fast travel to another planet. Fast travel to the surface and bunny hop to an objective through a boring city/space station/whatever. Fast travel back to your ship and do it all over again. I never made it far in the story because I couldn’t be bothered to give a damn. The characters were completely uninteresting at best. oh average they were mildly annoying.
Let me take off from the planets surface and fly in to space a few times before you lock me in to fast traveling. Let me fly from space and scream in to the atmosphere, shooting over the surface looking for a safe place to land, and navigate my way in to the city. Maybe 90% of the surface is uninteresting, that’s fine. But let me at least have some fun learning that.
They made every safe choice, and lost the sense of adventure. Because adventures aren’t supposed to be safe.
No Man’s Sky has you covered, in all the ways Starfield doesn’t.
No Man’s Sky was terrible at launch.
Fast travel to space, then fast travel to another planet. Fast travel to the surface and bunny hop to an objective through a boring city/space station/whatever. Fast travel back to your ship and do it all over again.
Loading Screens: The Game
I thought I was going crazy. “haven’t I been here before ??” I couldn’t believe they actually copied and pasted entire areas several times over
I mean technically they are copied infinitely due to proc gen. I just don’t get why they didn’t proc gen the POIs as well, would have at least made them more varied.
Yes, I had assumed they would be. It’s not even complicated to make modular interiors and scramble them
Lost interest in a few hours I was sad.
Great potential, horrible interface, wonky mechanicsI’ve played TES games since Daggerfall came out. That was my first giant open world game, and despite all of the horrible game breaking bugs I played it so much I risked my college degree.
Based on all of the descriptions and the fact that I’m right now only playing games that run well on the steam deck, I’m skipping this one for now. I couldn’t imagine the thousands of hours I’ve spent playing and replaying TES and Fallout games. But every release gets more dumbed down, it seems.
Honestly, the only thing keeping me from even checking it out is that it sounds boring. I’m still totally overplaying BG3, I love playing Stray, and Depth is great when I have limited time or attention. If everyone was raving about it, I might check it out, but as it is, I can wait.
I’m in the same historical boat as you. Arena was one of my first games on my 486. Here’s my take.
Starfield is Skyrim in Space with Daggerfall’s procedural generation. It may not be the perfect game (or for some people, even a good game), but it is the close-to-ideal Elder Scrolls experience in space.
Honestly, the only thing keeping me from even checking it out is that it sounds boring
I tried a Daggerfall playthrough where I went town to town looking for loot and doing nothing else. It got boring because the towns all started to look alike. So I stopped and just played it how it was meant to be played.
There’s no “boring” take if you ignore the procedural filler content and outpost system (which Bored me in my last FO4 playthrough) and focus on the storyline and main areas. The other stuff is all there for those of us who enjoy mission-fun. I LIKE pirating ships again and again, but maybe you don’t. Literally the boring complaints come from the fact that they gave us Daggerfall-level places to explore, with Daggerfall-level repetition.
That’s a great description! Thanks!
This is the first one that’s made me want to check out the game. I actually weirdly enjoyed the randomly generated dungeons that were basically all the same, probably because I had never played such a completely open world game before. At least some of it had to be the novelty compared to games like Ultima or the D&D games out at the time.
I’ve always played a lot of the RP part in my head - like in Morrowind I’d usually play as an escaped Argonian slave who became a thief-assassin after winning his freedom with a hatred for the Dunmer.
I’d this one is leaning back in that direction, I’ll check it out sooner rather than later.
The thing I like most is that the procedural stuff is never forced on you. Go pirating a bunch of random ships with random people. Or stick around to the Mars colony. Go exploring random military and science bases, or only go to the ones that were handcrafted. It’s really not hard to avoid the procedural content that bores you if any does. Nothing has bored me so far.
I learn the games I like from “what’s wrong with it”. Here’s what’s “wrong” with Starfield
- It’s not a physics simulator. Ragdoll is about the best you’re getting. The ship-building is unprecedented for an RPG, but not Space Engineers.
- It’s not an action shooter. People ridiculed that guards won’t aggro on you if you happen to shoot near them. There’s a video of someone drawing a minigun outline around a chill guard
- It’s not a seamless space simulator. You get load screens and the bases you’re building are cooler than FO4 but no minecraft. The FPS portion is much more polished than ship-flying.
- It’s not a NY Times bestselling storybook . There’s a few tropey factions and a few obvious plot points. There’s one specific mission where you’ll want to take the “sneak an atomic bomb into the building and reenact Fallout3’s Megaton bad version” strategy whether you play good or evil, but you won’t have that option (you’ll know the one I’m talking about if you see it). In that one case, I’d appreciate a “something good happens if you find a way to slaughter everyone in that boardroom”, but again… not what the game is about.
…all of the above, of course, sums up to “Skyrim in Space”.
That all sounds reasonable. I mean, Skyrim has the classic feature where you stealth shoot an arrow into somebody and they say “Who’s there?” followed by “I guess it was just the wind.” or whatever - with an arrow sticking out of their chest. At some point it just becomes a classic Bethesda aspect of the game. The base building was my least favorite part - but that was more about having to run back to defend stuff rather than just pushing through on side quests.
You nailed it.
My funniest moment is realizing that grenades are better stealth weapons than a pistol. Someone sees you shoot a silenced pistol, you’re screwed. If someone watches you throw a grenade, but you get into hiding fast enough, they don’t put 2 and 2 together between the thing you threw and that random explosion.
I was in a certain important location and accidentally hit the grenade button… So without thinking I ran. Everyone but one died, and nobody was mad at me. So I looted all the corpses, and walked on whistling.
God that reminds me of almost EVERY bad day I had in Fallout games.
What a grand and intoxicating innocence. How amusing. The Nerevar; an Argonian. The gods must be spiting me.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Starfield so far, put about 80 hours in and haven’t finished any of the questlines yet (largely intentionally, partially because I’ll get sucked into another questline and get distracted). I like the outpost building, the ground combat is fun, the space combat is ok, not on the level of Elite or Star Citizen, but still entertaining.
Solid game to me. Maybe it didn’t live up to people’s wildest expectations, but I went in expecting an enjoyable experience and got it. I don’t really get the hate for it.
Make your own opinion, don’t base expectations off of the unwashed masses. Or do, or don’t play it. You do you
That’s fair. I’ve been initially disappointed on a lot of their games due to the slide from doing basically anything in Daggerfall (but you might get stuck in a wall if you turn a corner too close) to Skyrim’s as-linear-as-open-world-gets approach. And I had about 4-5 false starts in FO4 despite playing all the other releases to the ending. Maybe it’s something that will click.
I do have to say that I am finding the Deck implementation of Cyberpunk unplayable without an external monitor and keyboard, so that sets an additional bar.
I’m gonna keep playing it, I just have better things to do at the moment. I have about 35 hours sunk into it. It will get better in time with updates and mods.
Same, I actually refunded it after 2 hours because I was already bored.
And I like space games.
Can we really be honest with ourselves for a second. It’s not the greatest game ever and it’s not the worst game ever. It can just be a game that some people like and others don’t.
I personally like it, but I can %100 see why others might not. It doesn’t need to be deeper than that really.
I’m like 90% certain they planned on a method to travel between systems without jumping or fast traveling.
He3 was supposed to be collected for jumping. However, if you run out near a planet that doesn’t have any, it would be very difficult to get anywhere. It would also mean one of the very first things any user would have to do is set up an outpost for he3 or buy a lot of it from vendors.
If there was a way to travel between planets and systems, even if it took a few minutes, new users could at least play around wherever they are and eventually set up an outpost to speed up the process. Maybe it would only be reasonable for planet-to-planet within the same system, but you would be able to find he3 somehow.
Also, the whole thing with jumping to a new system. If your travel path includes another system that you haven’t visited yet, you have to stop there first. It doesn’t make much sense from a gameplay perspective unless they planned on having users actually travel it.
deleted by creator
I have never, and probably will never, play a Bethesda game. They’re not my jam.
Starfield has been rubbed in my eyes for months and months now. And it is apparently merely “okay.”
The biggest studios make the most mediocre crap, and I wish people would stop talking about them.
I was turned off from the moment i saw at least most romance characters look 40-50 years old. Who the f wants those kinds of storylines with someone old enough to be their mom?
Your dad, for one.
Bold of you to assume everyone that plays is less than 30
Who the f wants those kinds of storylines with someone old enough to be their mom
Stop kink-shaming
I’m in that age range, and I wouldn’t want that type of storyline with a character who looks like a kid to me.
It’s not Bethesda’s greatest game but it’s not a terrible game in general. I definitely think companies need to stop over hyping their games as some groundbreaking game of the decade only to release a generic RPG.
But capitalism demands that games are overhyped. That hype will inevitably lead to more sales, and to that end it genuinely doesn’t matter if the game itself lives up to it.
I find the hype of something is inversely proportional to the quality of the end product. If some game company put 7 years into a game and their marketing was, “could be alright, see how you like it”. I’d be all over that shit like white on rice.
They hype it up because it works. Half or more of big games budget is marketing, and they make it all back with a good profit.
Exactly. The hype is always bs because in big studio it is literally marketing’s job to embellish/lie to generate hype and sales. Without a marketing dep you will only hear about games through word of mouths which imply the game made it on its own merits.
I wonder how much money was wasted on that Imagine Dragons song, that literally no one cares about now, that should have just been put into development.
This is how I thought everyone felt about Cyberpunk 2077, but even on launch it was a pretty sweet Bethesda-game by CDPR.
The entire time I was playing Starfield I was thinking “man, Cyberpunk 2077 was a really good open world RPG after all.”
Nothing quite like juxtaposition to make something shine.
CDPR releasing Phantom Liberty after Starfield is a genius move. I immediately bought Phantom Liberty after finishing a Starfield run.
The lack of rpg choices makes it less bethesda to me.
The only hoices that mattered were the ones that affected the silverhand percentages, and which ending you ulimately chose.
There’s also some choices in the relationships V can take, but they don’t change everything much. That said, I think I makes sense that what V does wouldn’t really have much of an effect on Night City.
The choices in relationships basically unlock endings. The game a distinct lack of alternative methods to complete missions via statcheck, which is very bethesda to me.
There are some, but its very few. For instance i went almost full cyberrunner but my cyberrunner abilities didnt give me alternative skips to many missions
I’m only watching someone play through but it’s just poorly written too. Every single person you meet knows you’re the main character and begs for your help.
Not really, many many of them are surprised when you offer to help
That seems to be more choices than any other Bethesda RP game. They got ahold of TES and Fallout and completely stripped out the idea of RPG “choices.” Gone are the days in TES and Fallout that one could role play as someone other than “the chosen one.” I’ll never defend Arena or Daggerfall for their graphics, but no game studio has put out a game since those two that literally allows the player to totally ignore the main quest line, with in game consequences for that. Nope. Time doesn’t matter, you’re the chosen one, and will “get around to it.” As far as I can tell, there is basically only one ending to any of these Bethesda “RPGs,” and no matter what choices you make, you’ll find that ending if you slog through enough “quests.”
Admittedly, I’ve never played fallout 1 or 2, though I own them, so I don’t actually know if the world building was as detailed as it was in Arena and Daggerfall.
Bethesda has always relied on modders to fix their platforms for them. They don’t make games. They make platforms that other people can mod to make the games that they wanted to make.
Try BG3, literally everything matters, almost everything is a choice with consequences and i don’t even know what the main plot is anymore since I am overwhelmed with possible choices
Oh I will. My current game that I’m waiting on is Cities Skylines 2, but I’ll probably pick up BG3 around the New Year.
Starfield itself was a step up from FO4, which almost lacked those entirely. Persuation was heavily used, and some of thr character traits you picked at the start led for unique chat dialogues, some just being extra chatter. But others allowing you to bypass an event because you had x trait.
Imo, Starfield isnt goty by any means, but it was virtually a step up from FO4 in almost all fronts except for exploration. Gunplay was better, rpgness was better, factions are better, customization was better. Skill tree imo was better.
The lack of rpg choices makes it less bethesda to me
You mean the games where the dialogue choices are:
- Yes
- Sarcastic yes
- More info/persuasion
- No for now (but yes later)
The checks on certain traits and skills you may have that bypass thing that could gove shottcuts or prevent a fight, e.g Starfield has a LOT of points where persuation would prevent a fight from breaking out, get you more credits, or offer an alternative solution to a conversation.
And its not like I havent played either game, ive already finished both CP2077 and Starfield effectively (minus the recent 2077 expansion)
deleted by creator
You mean $10 for GOTY edition with all the bonus DLC so they can go ahead and rerelease the same thing but with “HD” graphics and another $70 pricetag
Don’t forget, the HD version will:
- Look worse than the game with graphical mods
- Break all existing mods
But fear not! They’ll just remove the original version from the store.
looks at Dark Souls 1 on Steam
Accurate. But props to Bethesda for not including Denuvo so I didn’t have to feel cheated by paying for it.
They dont ivlude denuvo because it wouls effectively make modding harder, in particular, script extenders
People can say all they want about how dated the creation engine is, but its inclusion is the reason why modeing is significantly easier and the executable isnt riddled with drm
I told my friend months ago that as far as I can recall of all the Bethesda games I’ve played, in vanilla they are all at best, good. Skyrim and Fallout 3 are probably the pinnacle of their gaming achievements, but they are good, not great. The ability to mods their games into a Thomas the Tank Engine, Gothic horror, telenovela hellscape abomination is what makes those games great.
Starfield I think will be the same. It’s an ok game, but when the mods start really rolling in is when it will be worth playing.
Imo starfield has a lot of potential strictly because theres soo many planets you can choose to do mods on. Its proceedural vastness will give modders room to do stuff without overlapping with other mods.
Do i think Starfield is the best, far no, its better than FO4 to me, but worse than its 3d predecessors for FO/TES, but it leaves a lot of room for potential due to how much customization already exists in thr game.
agree, the core mechanics of the game I think are fine, the only real criticism I have is some of the visuals don’t look their place in 2023, mods will help here. I’ve always enjoyed the Bethesda RPG playstyle so the game just feels good to me, I’ll admit I expected spaceflight to be more than it is, but I am also ok with it
My personal biggest disappointment is the repeating point of interest. Yesterday I was on two planets and both had, even on the same planet itself, three times the same mine shaft, twice the same outpost, twice the same hole in the ground, with even mobs and ore placed on the same spots.
Seriously, this should never happen under any circumstances. It was the first time in the game I kind of felt the negative grow. While I still enjoy the rest.
That said, it’s also true that the game is average in many aspects, which is enough to be enjoyable for me but not others.
I didn have this once, 2 planets with identical mines, even had the same dead bodies in the same spots
Will Skyrim remain as Bethesda’s greatest triumph? Find out in the next episode of Elder Ball Z: “Skyrim is the greatest after all”
Morrowind erasure.
Seriously, it was my first open world RPG and I’ve been chasing the dragon ever since
The water, like, moved. They tried to make it look like real water. And for it’s time I was blown away. Not to mention the giant bugs you could ride around on. The fucking god just kind of hovering there in the main city, the mushrooms. The fact that you could GROW YOUR OWN MISHROOM TO LIVE IN And the cliff racers. Oh my God the cliff racers. All the cliff racers you could ever want. Everywhere. Just asking to be punched in their faces. Every game before and since really needs to look at morrowind and take bite, because if I’m not getting pecked in the face at least every 30 seconds I’m playing by a cliff racers then YOUR GAME IS DHIT. FIX IT.
There’s also just SO MANY random and interesting encounters that you could entirely miss. There’s the person who lost a ring in a pond, but when you jump down to get it, they assault you. There’s the Nord that has been stripped naked and frozen in place by a witch. There’s the boots of blinding speed (I loved throwing these on and using the mini-map to navigate the roads).
I also loved the way you had to utilize multiple forms of fast travel to get around. “Okay, if I take the silt strider to Balmora, there’s a Mage’s Guild that will take me to-”. It was a fun world to live in.
And the factions forced you to choose between them. You couldn’t do it all with one character, because that wouldn’t make sense!
Maybe I’ll go get OpenMW and play for a bit again…
240 times. It took me two minutes to finish the “minigame” last time I did it. That’s 8 hours of grinding to max out every skill. Not 8 hours of fun gameplay and visually interesting dragon fights and dungeon crawls, 8 hours (that’s eight hours) of flying from one shiny spot to the next. Eight. 8. Hours. Of slow-ass zero G floating.
Last time I booted the game up, I fast traveled to my ship, took off, and heard Sarah say she has something for me. Something about that same line played for the millionth time absolutely killed my motivation to play, and I haven’t started the game up in like a week. The romance system is too much too fast. I went from “flirting” with Sarah to married in like 4 hours. We’ve known each other for all of one in-game month. Maybe I’m just a broken person, but the way we talk sounds so disingenuously infatuated.
I think about the concept of playing, and it sounds fun in theory, but realistically what am I gonna get done in the next 8 hours? I’ll talk to people that I don’t care about to move through a story that I’m fundamentally disinterested in because I know that >!in order to max out the dragon shou–I mean, Starborn powers, I’ll need to jump through and abandon alternate universes like Rick Sanchez but not as an ironic critique of internet nihilism. Hours and hours and hours wasted on >!timelines I don’t care about just to get to the end game where I… have strong powers and a good ship, and can’t connect with any of the characters because they’ll be the tenth iteration of the same ones that I could never convince myself to care about before.!<
Maybe in a year or two after the game has been updated, I’ll check it out again. Maybe I can shut my brain off for a minute and pretend I’m not >!grinding through universes!< if it doesn’t take me eight hours to max out all the powers. Or maybe I’ll just play BG3 when it comes to Xbox and forget that Starfield ever existed in the first place
I really don’t understand how they green lit that design choice.
It was like Ubisoft towers on crack.
“Let’s take the least interesting gameplay mechanic possible, and then gate one of the only interesting mechanics behind it. And then let’s also make it take a few minutes of jetpacking around a barren planet to get there beforehand, to really jazz it up.”
Todd: “Yes, exactly! See that temple over there? Your can go there. And go there. And go there again. And again. And again. And again. Again. Again. Again.”
Devs look at each other…
“Is Toddbot broken or is this good gameplay design? Kenny, are you writing this shit down?”
I can believe that one of them played the little temple minigame once and thought it was cool, but unless they’re literal space aliens, I cannot imagine the thought of doing that for eight hours even crossed their mind.
Those temples are so weak. Getting the dragon powers felt somewhat primal. But floating through a bit of space dust, not so much
Anon is not wrong.
The thing about word walls is it’s simple and it just works. You suck the ancient text, behold the epic fanfare and leave. Temples, on the other hand, make for a great spectacle the first time you experience it. Then you realize you have to do the same ritual again and again.
Feel like they should’ve shortened them after the first one or two times you do it, so you only have to collect two of the things. Explain it as your connection to the temples growing as you gain their power or something, or even just don’t explain it at all.
They should have just left out the minigame, would have been more interesting to walk into a room with this giant ring hovering there.
Or just hit the one trigger (that’s always directly between you and the ring) and it stops spinning.
That works too
