I love TES. I played so much Daggerfall that I almost failed out of my undergrad program, and that was one of the most bug-filled games I ever played. I loved Morrowind and I very much got into the lore by playing underclass characters with a chip on their shoulder. I didn’t like the console-inspired simplifications in Oblivion, but again I eventually let that go and got into the game. That goes double for Skyrim. With each release, Bethesda simplified the game and removed functionality that really added to my enjoyment, but I still ended up logging uncountable hours into the games. There’s 2080 hours in a work-year, and I’ve probably spent at least a few of those on Bethesda games, with about half going into TES.
That said, I am waiting on this one. I’ve mostly moved over to playing PC games on the steam deck, and I’ve heard nothing great about that. More than that, it looks like this one whipped with much less functionality than it should have had. Again, that’s typical of Bethesda, but I have too big of a backlog to worry about paying to be their beta tester. They can fix bugs while I finish BG 3 and Stray, and if it looks good at that point I’ll dive in.
I’m at a point in my life where spending $50 or $100 on a game isn’t a tough decision, and I’ve even had to become comfortable with the fact that, even having done that, I might never fire it up. That’s one reason I bought the deck, actually. But I’m not at the point that I’m going to buy a game that I know I’ll find unplayable (by my current standards) just to be one of the multiple millions of people who get to see it “first.”
It’s perfectly reasonable to wait. Games only gonna get better.
I’d try not to read too much into the internet fuss. It’s a better release than Bethesda’s usual in most regards. I wound up sinking almost the entire weekend into it, haven’t done that in ages. The games really fun. That said, it is only going to get better with time.
It’s better than usual because Microsoft put literally all their QA teams onto Starfield, and to wit, it’s been probably the least buggy launch of any Bethesda game I’ve ever played. It’s funny because they were getting worse.
Skyrim had bugs, became a classic. Fallout 4 had basically the same bugs, because it was the same engine. Vertibirds are technically recoded dragons. Fallout 76 was once again a copy/paste of the engine with netcode slapped on top and Jesus fuck was that probably the buggiest game I’ve ever played on launch.
It does get better with time, but it’s inexcusable that they need to rely on the community to make it better. Skyrim got re-released 20 times and they never once improved on it in any meaningful way besides deploying it on a newer engine and building a high resolution texture pack rather than addressing the UI or map issues. A solid decade later and I’m still playing with the same UI mods and map mods.
I’m not a fan of Bethesda’s reliance on mods to do basic shit, like fix a broken UI and inventory management system, by honestly I also think this argument is overused. People pay for these games because they want to mod the shit out of them, it’s like ninety percent of the appeal. Nobody is forcing modders to work on them, either. That argument can only stretch so far. For comparison, No Man’s Sky is actively hostile to modding, and as a result I probably won’t be going back to it despite loving it. They’re not going to add the kind of content I want, they’re likely never going to, and they’re not letting anyone else do it either. I wish they’d allow free volunteers to finish off some of their 75%-of-the-way-to-greatness features.
With starfield, I’m excited for the mods, and the game is far from flawless goodness knows, but I’ve had a friggin good time and definitely got my money’s worth on vanilla. Now I look forward to spicing it as I like.
That’s fine. Allow mods, that should never get in the way of building a proper base product. Many games allow mods and have basic functionality fully fleshed out and the mods are just that, bonuses and modifications. It’s not an excuse.
The 84 isn’t from people fighting console wars, though - these are the reviewer scores, not user scores. So as more actual reviewers are finishing and writing up their impressions, the scores are dipping. The scores aren’t bad by any means, but they aren’t as good as when only a handful of reviewers that got review copies had their reviews out.
Yeah it’s pretty easy to understand that the 84 is the professional reviews. I guess there aren’t just 64 people who put a comment, but 6190 who put a comment (from the image in the post).
The more professional reviews come out the more the score has a chance to go down compared to the first reviews if they were very high. And give some sort of average.
However profesional review scores don’t always align to what most users think, as people like different things, but also the users get very much bothered by a bad start. While the reviewers will give a score on the entire game.
I trust the scores that come after release over the ones that came before, because post release scores aren’t concerned with biting the hand that feeds re: getting future review copies for titles down the line. It’s telling that a lot of the earlier ones are higher but just say “great game, Bethesda’s knocked it out of the park again” with a sentence or two, and later, lower ones are a lot meatier with specific criticisms.
I think it’s worth noting that there are a lot of irrelevant low reviews from the review bombers too, as well as zeroes from the people who are upset that you can choose your pronouns. I’ve played the game. I don’t like the game - I think it’s bad on its own merits, or lack thereof. Where I think FO4 was a ‘meh’ because of the less impactful character building and stripped-down dialogue system, doubling down on the clutter looter aspects, I call Starfield bad because the same clutter looting and character building with a new coat of paint is now gated behind repetitive tasks and mostly barren procgen maps. There’s more layers of obligatory fast travel between the parts of the game that are enjoyable, and that’s in service of the parts of the game that aren’t. The game is objectively worse than FO4 for those reasons, and in the case of the leveling system, it didn’t even need to be.
And you know, while I’m airing my grievances here, I also think it’s fair to have higher standards in the eight years between the two games - Bethesda doesn’t get to hide behind their own old engine the same way Obsidian gets a pass for the issues FNV runs into - it’s their engine. They should know from the get-go whether the game they want to make can be supported with a system built over a decade ago, and if it’s not, they should be prepared to go back to square one. They had plenty of time; I don’t believe for a second they couldn’t have made this game right, but they were hell-bent on getting one more game out of the Creation engine, and by god did they, for better or (much, much) worse. So when people say “It’s Bethesda, what did you expect?” I will answer, from the top of this hill where I’m already carving my fucking epitaph, “Something more and better than what we got last decade.” And people give shit for that expectation? I’m supposed to be impressed that they plugged the random number generator that puts cartons of cigarettes in trashcans into a random planet generator? That in the eight years between FO4 and this samey, shallow, mediocre mess, two more than the development time between Daggerfall and Morrowind, that arguably set the standard for this kind of game with its masterfully crafted world, with huge setpiece cities full of bespoke characters and encounters, they’ve managed to stretch the disappointment of randomized containers full of vendor trash and blocky bases full of raiders over thousands of empty maps? Give me a break. Game bad. Emperor Todd has no clothes and I’m fucking calling it out.
I’ve been really enjoying the game, just past 70hours on Xbox and starting the 2nd main story mission quest. Planning on starting new on PC shortly after I complete my current character. I don’t understand the console hate. I was upset when Spiderman on PS4 was an exclusive, but later I got a PS4, played/beat it, had a blast. Hate for something because you can’t play it is just wild. Just like people hating on huge houses or seeing expansive cars just because they don’t have it. Underline jealousy. If you really hate it that much because you can’t play/have it, work towards obtaining it and appreciating it. I’ve been really happy with most of the games that have come out/still planning on coming out this year, best in a long time for me
Making excuses as to why the game isn’t reviewing as highly as they think it should be. Not understanding that sone people just don’t like the game as much as they do.
I was upset when Spiderman on PS4 was an exclusive
Exclusives are actively hurting the consumer, being upset is normal.
Hate for something because you can’t play it is just wild
If it’s because someone decided they can milk more money by making it exclusive, it’s not that wild.
Just like people hating on huge houses or seeing expansive cars just because they don’t have it
It seems your world view is dominated by jealousy a lot and you project it onto others. I hate huge houses and expensive cars because it’s just to show everyone around how rich you are and serves no other purpose. All that while other people suffer and struggle to survive.
I mean, I get where you're coming from. But this didn't start with Starfield, and Sony has a great track record of even more restrictive platforming than Xbox does. Microsoft games are now usually accompanied by some kind of PC access.
Not an excuse, but expecting Microsoft to extend an olive branch of non-exclusivity to Sony when they have historically been incredibly averse to it themselves is not really a realistic expectation.
They're just bad at UI in general. Every one of their RPGs end up with a UI mod that makes their terrible menus not only useable, but infinitely better than the crap they made.
I was mainly after a mod that would show how much of an item I have in my inventory when buying. This mod does that and more. The achievement mod just keeps achievement enabled with mods installed.
Skyrim needed UI mods, and to wit, still needs UI mods, despite being re-released like 15 times with limitless opportunities to improve basically anything - instead they focused on high resolution textures, which is something that the fanbase basically already makes on launch week.
Weren’t the anniversary texture packs (or special edition, forge when they got introduced) so poorly optimized most guides reccomend against using them over moder developed ones? Been awhile since I’ve modded akyrim, could be thinking of Fallout 4.
Perhaps. I think in terms of Fallout they may have made the maps kind of “stylized” like how the rest of the pip-boy is, but it definitely didn’t make the game very fun. Especially when I was lost in one of the many maze-like dungeon levels and the map just wasn’t helping.
The indoors Fallout map is the worst thing ever. I don’t think it’s ever once helped me out of a jam or cleared up confusion. If there are multiple levels (and there always are) it’s all just slapped together in a single plane on the map so it makes less than zero sense.
Yeah. The worst case of it I’ve seen is in the “Come Fly With Me” quest in New Vegas. The indoor area is split into two sections each that are both multiple floors, and both of the floors vary surprisingly not at all in the way they look. Especially the underground section. The quest has you navigating the whole building about a dozen times too, so it just becomes a nightmare.
"A little jarring" is being very generous. For me, Skyrim's map is one of the worst maps I've ever had the displeasure of using. Skyrim is a grey game with grey landscape, and the map really emphasizes how grey everything is: grey land with grey icons on top and grey clouds covering most of the landscape (such a great idea). I don't mind that the map is 3D, but the camera angle limits is what pisses me off, they seem to choose the worst possible angles to showcase the map. There are no road markings whatsoever, and the LOD is so low that you can barely make out any feature on the map (considering you're lucky to find a patch in the map that isn't covered by the grey clouds).
I know that Fallout's maps are bad as well, you can barely see shit in them except for the markers, but at least it's in theme with the game, so it gets a pass. Starfield's is in theme and is pretty much like the Fallout maps, but the fact that there's literally no other features make it terrible as well, but I much rather have a completely blue screen with some markers spread around than trying to navigate Skyrim's map.
Oblivion's where it's at. They should have expanded on what they did there: simple 2D maps that are in theme with the game, clearly depicting main roads and some minor paths and simple depictions of the main cities' walls.
I just wrote a little jarring because I frankly didnt play much of Skyrim. I know, I’m such a heathen ;). So I was just going off of memory. You’re right that it’s bad though now that I’ve looked at videos of it.
The menus are pretty fucking awful. The map is really really bad. For a game that’s like 90% based around fast travel you would think they would have a map that makes sense.
Skyrim never improved on any of these aspects even though it got re-released like 15 times. I still have to use UI addons a dozen years later. I love that Bethesda has a great, strong modding community, but it’s really really shitty that they’re constantly relied on for regular, baseline things that shouldn’t be bad.
At the very least, they could have added viewable maps at those terminals in the cities, a lot like how some zoos usually have a fairly readable map, often with a “you are here!” marker to help out.
I would love to know what shops are selling rather than guessing based on the shop’s name. I remember running around Jemison for like a half hour trying to figure out who the fuck sold ammunition when I started.
Once again fans are stepping up to help Bethesda patch up their latest release. Still, the fact that there are no city maps is just kind of baffling. I could understand a bad map or a confusing map, but just a bunch of icons in blank space? It still feels like it should be a glitch even though it is apparently completely intended.
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