Idk, I like it. Obviously it’s not perfect. I’m level 32 and plan to keep playing.
My perception might be skewed though. My previous steam purchase was KSP2 and, comparatively, Starfield is much more polished and has way more content.
I am kind of in a similar boat. I mostly play games like KSP and Cities Skylines, and I’ve never played another Bathesda game. I actually enjoyed starfield enough to beat it, but not enough to play the new game plus.
space DMT was fun, space dragon shouts were just “why”. Additionally the fact there is no lore about the ancient race that built the artifacts infuriates me, not even a “they all disappeared due to mysterious circumstances”, they were, and now they are not, now go chase the macguffin
[SPOILER] Oh, the game does answer that...What really pissed me off is that the game offers one option to ask “Who made this stuff?” when you reach the Unity. The reply you get? “You just answered it yourself” Seriously? Taking fucking jabs at the player now? Fuck you, Todd Howard. Fuck you, Emil Pagliarulo.
yeah that’s not the sort of explanation or answer i feel satisfied with lol
you can also ask the Hunter at some point about where did the artifacts come from and he answers something like “don’t know, don’t care, i just want them and so should you”
then within unity it’s just a meaningless pseudo-philosophical (or meta) vagueness that pretends to say something whilst saying nothing because the writers haven’t come up with it yet
it’s just so painfully boring, i love TES and Fallout worlds for their surface level fun that occupies the dopamine gremlin in my brain and the deep lore full of mysteries and questions that pleases the nerd too. The worlds there feel like grand mysteries, they’ve spawned many debates and lore youtube channels trying to piece it together. Yeah they have plotholes, but as someone on tumblr said - plotholes are actually pockets where fans can keep their theories (or something like that).
What absolutely infuriates me about starfield is that bethesda had all the tools, all the experience, and all the manpower to give us another living, breathing world, a literal cosmos full of mysteries and opportunities - and they gave us this. Empty planets, with like 6 copy-pasted dungeons filled with either of 2 baddie guys to shoot at. I wanted to love Starfield, but after I finished it I just felt relief that it’s done, checked out the cool ship, and uninstalled it.
Same! I’m hoping to get a modlist sorted and played before getting into Fallout: London, another astounding mod-effort that will reinvigorate a boring base game.
There are so many new games I want to experience before doing replays, but I’m super tempted to go back to New Vegas after all the incredible mods that have come out the past year and a half (when I played last).
Comments like this always makes me wonder, was this just a simple misclick, or are there just a chunk of users who are too technologically inept to figure out how to reply to comments?
Lol, I was thinking the same thing. I agree with what he’s saying, but he just looks like he’s punching air when nobody is doing what he’s accusing them of.
One of the most unjustified review bombings in recent years, IMO. The game is very much a standard Bethesda game, and is fine. Mods and DLCs are what people buy Bethesda games for, anyways.
Don’t get me wrong, Bethesda themselves are very mediocre game devs, but their specific style of game lends itself well to modding.
Starfield is just as mediocre as Skyrim and Fallout 4, everyone who made Morrowind great is gone, Bethesda games ride on the success of their modding communities.
i had a lot of fun. i think people just expect too much from this type of game and bethesda. look at no mans sky, i still think its just as boring as when it released but it has gained a great following. people now seem to just assume if a game is made by a AAA team everyone must love it regardless of personal taste. in my opinion that mind set is the reason most AAA get focus grouped to death. im scared that people are going to kill off the type of games i like because everyone acts like its crime to release a game that doesn’t appeal to everyones exact tastes/desires.
i will say though starfield is my least favorite bethesda game. starfield 7/10
Still a 7? Just curious, what made it fun for you? What were the expectations? Legit curious, as finding a good comment about the game that doesnt sound salty af is far in between.
I found skyrim fun for 60ish hours and than got extremely bored. Never touched it again. Starfield looked like that but barren as hell, which is not what it is sold as. Those are my personal reasons for not touching it though!
well, i thought of it as fallout 4 in space before playing. it has a couple core gameplay changes i liked and a couple i didn’t. it is the slowest paced bethesda game for sure, which is why i think most people call it boring. if you didnt replay skyrim i doubt you would replay this game. i give it a 7/10 for people of my taste and i would consider myself the intended audience. i have played bethesda games since oblivion and average about 200 hours per bethesda game, usually 3 playthroughs seperated by about a year or 2. for reference here are my top bethesda games:
Fallout: New Vegas - 9/10(obsidian for a major win)
Fallout 3 - 9/10
Oblivion - 9/10
Skyrim - 8/10
Fallout 4 - 8/10
Starfield - 7/10
Fallout 76 - 3/10 - i wish i could enjoy this game
these scores reflect how much i enjoyed each game. but if New Vegas had no technical issues it would be 10/10 for me.
Ye, that makes perfect sense, thanks! From your other scoring, i can see the game isnt that bad, but just average. Even compared to the others, which are rated a lot higher. From this i can also assume id enjoy the game for like 30sh hours, because this isnt 100% my jam. For me that wouldnt be worth the full price, but i can understand for somebody that would put 200h in np it would be worth it :)
Not op but I too give it 6 or 7. I liked the story. I liked shooting things. I liked the dialogue. I liked the base building. Liked the graphics, it was super quick for me on my 4900 xt. But everything was liked. Not loved. It was mediocre in everything. The POI were fun, but there are like 10 that get recycled. I like the planets but they’re also recycled. I like the cities but they’re all the size of a tiny town. It’s fun but it was sold as something grand which undersold it’s promises. First colony outside of earth, biggest civilization, has like a population of 100 if that. They should have sold the entire story as worlds on the rim. Not the hub of humanity.
yeah i would agree with you for the most part. i guess im lucky i ignored the hype after the announcement. i have seen the hype train derail too many times.
The problem is that the game fell flat even on a lot of basic expectations, especially exploration.
When you first arrive on a new star, you’re automagically orbiting the “most important planet”, if it has one. Without doing anything other than arriving, you already know all the inorganic resources of every planet and moon around that star (you don’t know where, but you already know it’s there without a scan). Not only that, you know which planets have abandoned mines or settlements and where. While flying in orbit, if “nothing happens” in the first 10 seconds, nothing will happen, period. POI in space all have to be fast traveled to.
It manages to be worse than NMS where the parallel is obvious, like in scanning fauna/flora, where you activate the scanner, point and click and call it day. But do it 8 times just to say it’s different.
Shipbuilding is fun, but the fucked that up by locking many parts behind two different skills, Piloting and Starship Design. It really feels like something they did because they couldn’t figure a way to balance the economy around ship prices. They could’ve made it so that you get access to better parts by completing faction missions, that’d give actual reason for the players to do them other than sheer curiosity, but nope, spend precious skill points to get better ship parts!
This game is a pile of bad design decisions on top of more bad design decisions and whether the company is AAA or not is irrelevant. Bad implementation, aka errors and bugs, is a matter of coding. Bad design is a matter of direction, or lack thereof.
i agree that the exploration outside of the main areas is very sparce, but i think its important to cosider thats is what was promised, and the lore backs it up. i liked the hand-crafted areas a lot but outside of those areas tends to feel like NMS with a couple generic things to do every some often. but i still enjoyed building my bases and running in a circle around them destorying all abandon factories with rando baddies i could find.
i agree the fact that they are a AAA studio is irrelevant, but most people do judge things differently when considering this. its too often i see people praising indie games that i eventually try and hate. but i dont freak out and call it terrible, i stop playing. and i see well made AAA games that i greatly enjoy get review bombed for defending there design decisions which were based of what the designers consider fun.
but i dont agree that they made a “pile” of bad decisions. Again i think they were trying to make a fun game and most of the designer probably enjoyed playing it before releasing. but the majority of people who thought bethesda was making “their” dream space shooter didn’t like it so know bethesda is evil for some reason. i liked this game, i will play the dlc, and likely replay it.
I agree that the skill-locked purchase of physical equipment is garbage but I found myself sticking on the question of if you got the ‘de-facto’ best ship part for each category because you had the relevant skill.
Like some quest is occuring and, in dialogue, you have a choice locked by being the most-skilled pilot and choosing it leads to one set of the best ship parts. How does that flow? Does that read as the same thing, or is it more enjoyable now as a reward for character build?
you have a choice locked by being the most-skilled pilot and choosing it leads to one set of the best ship parts. How does that flow?
You got my idea wrong
you get access to better parts by completing faction missions,
I meant that, as a reward for finishing a quest, or series of quests, the ship parts become available. It’s not “choose to get a ship part during the quest”, it’s “complete quest, vendors now sell new stuff”.
For instance, completing mission 4 of the UC Vanguard opens up B class parts because “congratulations, we’re promoting you” or, given how that questline flows, “We’re promoting you because things are getting dangerous and you need access to the extra stuff”. Completing the final mission unlocks C class parts. But those are only at the Deimos Staryards, since they’re the sole contractor for UC. It wouldn’t make sense to complete their questline and also get access to FC’s B and C class ship parts, for that you’d have to complete their Freestar Ranger questline. That’s the idea.
look at no mans sky, i still think its just as boring as when it released
I get opinions are subjective, but I don’t believe this is a fair opinion to have, based on the amount of new content they have released over the life of the game. They’ve added more quests and more things to do and explore.
It’s a very sandboxy game, which may be what you’re speaking towards (if you don’t enjoy sandbox games that is)?
There’s no voiceover work to be spoken of. You’re constantly just reading dialog and menus. The loop isn’t that different from almost any other open world survival crafting game, except it has spaceships you can fly from planet to space - just like in Space Engineers an arguably better space sandbox game that’s actually a sandbox.
My comment was directed towards this though, and not what you mentioned …
i still think its just as boring as when it released
… I was challenging the before and after nature that the OP was commenting about, especially after all the new content that was added to NMS over the years.
When I mentioned sandbox that was because I was trying to determine if he’s a ‘guided path’ versus ‘sandbox’ type of player, and maybe that’s what might be driving his boredom factor throughout the life of NMS, versus the before and after nature comparison.
As far as your comment goes (see below), none of that talks towards the boredom of the NMS game, just a similarity to other survival games, as well as mentioning another sandbox game that you thought was better.
There’s no voiceover work to be spoken of. You’re constantly just reading dialog and menus. The loop isn’t that different from almost any other open world survival crafting game, except it has spaceships you can fly from planet to space - just like in Space Engineers an arguably better space sandbox game that’s actually a sandbox.
I bought it about 2 years after launch, played through the main story, and then kinda got bored with it because it’s just the same thing over and over again. I came back after the first major update, played it for a few weeks and then got bored again because it was mostly a “fixing things to how we wanted them to be”. I played after the next major update as well and while it did bring some new life back into the game, it’s still essentially just “build a base to put these few things in and collect resources so you can build more stuff” or “do these pointless side quests so that you can buy/build more stuff”.
Thanks for the clarification. I am curious about one thing though?
Are you a ‘sandbox’ type of player, or a ‘guided path’ type of player (if you had to choose one)?
I’m wondering if you’re the latter type of player, and if it has driven your outlook on the game, throughout all the years it’s existed, with all the additional content added to it throughout those years?
Yeah it’s funny to mention NMS, as what I’ve heard from most people is that you’d have money AND get more value by buying that particular today over Starfield
i watched all of the update for NMS. the updates are cool but non of them made it more interesting. i would like to say i think it is a good game, but at the end of the day starfield aligns with my likes much better.
I knew what to expect, and I was still disappointed. I was expecting the constant loading, and the jank, and the shit AI, etc. I was also expecting the world building to be decent, and the quests to be interesting with tons of distractions that keep you coming back. That’s what makes it a disappointment; the actually good things about a Bethesda RPG are totally absent in Starfield. It’s just the mechanics and formula; none of the flair or personality.
If only old school Bethesda fans had warned us of this trend of Bethesda removing the very things that make their games worthwhile for their last four major releases.
People expected a game about exploration. Because it’s a Bethesda game, and because it’s a space bethesda game, and somehow Bethesda managed to make a game that doesn’t really have exploration in it despite having loads of planets.
Why did they not just make a single solar system full of curated content, why did it have to be set in the vast universe forcing them to use random generation, that is full of nothing? They sent themselves up to fail on this one.
after starfield i finally played Outer Wilds (not a typo) and goodness, i have so much more memories with that game than starfield, despite the fact i finished it in half the time i beat starfield
if you’re craving incredibly crafted space exploration play Outer Wilds, don’t look up anything about it though, it’s one of those that will make you wish for amnesia so you can experience it again for the first time
The expansion is very good too if you haven’t played it yet. Luckily my memory isn’t the best so when I managed to replay the game after finally picking up the DLC I got to rediscover many parts of the game.
Starfield is one of the most bland games ever made. Bethesda needs to get better. Their game design is outdated. Starfield is not going to get saved by modders.
I came across this post while listening to a primarily Elder Scrolls YouTuber talk about Starfield. I haven’t bought Starfield myself, but was planning on doing so when it goes on sale eventually.
He’s going through and just listing mechanic after mechanic that is missing from Starfield that existed in previous Elder Scrolls and Fallout games. Even basic UI and QoL features, but also the mechanics and how they interact, the way the game seems to be trying to be taking multiplayer looter-shooter mechanics for a singke-player experience.
I don’t think their game design is outdated. It looks more like they’ve gotten away from their old game design and are just copying other big modern games.
To be clear I haven’t bought or played the game myself. The video on question was from Camelworks if you’re interested.
But yeah right now I can’t see myself buying it for any more than $5 to mess around with. Best-case scenario is probably that they release some DLC that fixes a lot of things and maybe my personal valuation of a “complete” edition goes up to more like $20. I would also probably need to upgrade my RX580 too lol.
Feels like they threw a bunch of different little systems and forgot to connect them in any manner, which makes them pointless.
Outposts exists so you can get materials and create stuff. The “get raw stuff, make industrial stuff” part can be ignored, as you can easily find merchants selling resources and components you might need. Outposts thus become pointless, other than for farming XP.
“Exploration” is there so you have “something” to do while on land, other than to blindly speed towards the nearest POI. The reward for completely “discovering” everything in a planet is a slate that you can sell for 1700~2200 creds to Vladimir.
Your ship exists, but they forgot to give the player a reason to be flying it in the first place. You can “mine” asteroids but, just like outposts, there’s no reason to. Dogfighting in space is passable. Not good, but not terrible. But most of the time, you’re supposed to fully skip it and just go on land anyway. Which makes the “Spacer” weapon modifier (+30% damage in space, -15% on land) one of the worst in the game.
Some time ago I made a new modlist for Skyrim from scratch and forgot to include SkyUI, and after starting the game recoiled in horror. How can you make their baseline interface worse.
I’ve gotta admit: I’ve put probably between 1,000 and 1,500 hours into Skyrim on various platforms. Never found the need to mod anything more than the unofficial patch and script extender.
Even a lot of the “official” mods in the anniversary edition I end up turning off. While I appreciate the spirit of the community, I find most mods just don’t jive with the vibes of the game.
This is the actual problem and yet I think the idiot publishers are going to think “geez I guess people don’t like space games, we won’t fund more of that then.”
From what I understand modders have already bailed on starfield :(
From what I understand modders have already bailed on starfield :(
Not really. 1 modder made a public rant about how they were quitting Starfield and some “journalist” outlets exaggerated that to make it seem like all modders were quitting
Well, that may be for the best. Good “space games” are really hard to make for a variety of obvious reasons, so publishers should be really picky about the ones they greenlight.
Towers are actually a quite nice mechanic if done right, like in Horizon Zero Dawn or Zelda (or so I’ve heard). Now if it werent’ for Ubisoft being Ubisoft throwing content at their games without rhyme or reason for the sake of having lots of content. In fact HZD is probably the best ubisofty game ever, it takes the formula and does it right.
I’m mostly enjoying it, but that’s after I spent a lot of hours modding the game to look great. I don’t mean installing mods I mean modding. (I’m on the Luma mod team). That means fixing the horrible compressed range that is terrible for OLED. Completely replacing the Hable tone mapper after multiple attempts allowing contrast to get properly ramped up. Finally properly fixing the ridiculous fog in shadows from the color grading. Last, I replaced the film grain when theirs just raises blacks and is more digital camera noise than film-like. That only took 3 months. I’ve enjoyed the technical challenge from doing it, but if this were a game that couldn’t be modded, I wouldn’t have given it a week.
I also just realized the best part of the game are the story missions. Not the side quests, not the activities or exploration.
The worst part of the game is it’s both all fast-travel: where you have to jump from planet to planet in a fetch quest; and it’s no fast travel where the game expects you to run on foot 2000km to complete a survey.
The story and characters have charm and personality and that’s time better spent. I think there’s some good elements there, but overall I don’t recommend the game. It’s a solid 7/10 game, but completely hit-or-miss if you connect with it.
Yeah, I have 300 hours from doing all the quests up to ng+ but I couldn’t bring myself to repeat all that. Especially the temples.
…and also I am very impressed by the engine. Fallout 4 would have me running into LOD version of the world if I sprinted for too long, Starfield handles setav speedmult 500 like a champ. Makes exploring a breeze.
The tone mapping is awful, it really makes exteriors look dull. Good on you for managing to change that. I can’t relate with the part about the characters though, I found them completely devoid of life… and that’s one of the main things that drew me away from the game after roughly 25hrs
Thank you for your contribution. Mod Authors in general are GOATed for what they do, but the ones that do tiny things like these are some unsung heroes, IMO.
I personally really enjoyed the trip. Far from perfect, and more a 2010 game in its core, but quite entertaining. However, I would have been disappointed if I had to pay 80€ for it (especially because this game lacks polish). I had no hesitation thanks to the gamepass, and I have no regret playing 100h to it :).
I think the backlash is a bit excessive. It feels like people expected this game to be exceptional, having huge expectations that were never met. It’s Bethesda, how can we expect a master piece from them on day one? Besides, it’s not like a success like Skyrim can be reproduced that easily. It’s not bad to have expectations, but if the game is different than what you had in mind, it’s not the game’s fault imo (and it happens too frequently those years, as if all major releases are bad games that should never be played).
These are just a few random quotes I found with a minute of Googling but there are many more out there. I think people were expecting exceptional and had huge expectations because Bethesda and Microsoft were very much pushing the hype train a lot. They set up the game as one thing and what was delivered was a pale shadow of it. I agree you can’t expect for the success of Skyrim, but it was 100% presented to the world like it would be. There are many parts of the game that fall short of what Skyrim did 13 years ago and what other Bethesda RPGs were doing decades ago in terms of quest design and dialogue.
“We’ve always wanted to play the game we’re making and no-one else has quite pulled it off in what we’re doing. And we feel that once we started putting some pieces in place and playing parts of it, there’s something really… I don’t want to say too much but… pretty incredible there.”
“It’s very big, yeah. People are still playing Skyrim and we have learned from that. We spent more time building [Starfield] to be played for a long time, if you so chose that you just wanted to keep playing it. It’s got some more hooks in it for that, that we added later to a game like Skyrim… while still making sure that somebody who just wants to play it, and go through the main quests and “win”, or feel they’ve accomplished something large is doable.”
“And it has large scale goals and storytelling, but that minute-to-minute feels rewarding for you. And if you just want to pass the time and go watch the sunset and pick flowers it’s rewarding in that way too. The quiet moments feel really really good.”
Yes, it seems to be it. I personally do not like this way of thinking. Marketing is always going to put up some lies in order to sell the product. It feels strange to me to judge a game from what the marketing said about it, instead of what the game truly is. Of course, it would be very disappointing if you can only rely on what the marketing said when deciding to buy or not buy the game. But with all the options available nowadays (reviews, streams, test it for 10€ thanks to the gamepass instead of paying 80€ directly), it seems strange to me to spend so much money, without informing yourself enough, and be this angry afterwards.
As I said, it’s not like the game is perfect, but it’s far to be as bad as those « user reviews » depicts.
It’s the same people who were sending death threats to CDPR over Cyberpunk. They had built up up an internal hype saying that [insert game] was going to replace their life, and they would have no reason to ever leave their computer again. When that obviously didn’t happen (and it had the some bugs on launch, although not universally game-crashing levels of bugs like Skyrim on launch, which people seem to forget) they decided that they needed to stomp the game into the ground and nobody was allowed to enjoy it ever. Unfortunately the internet is all bandwagon these days and the petulant children have managed to get a cloud of negativity to hang around the game. Talk to some adults about the game and you’ll find that it’s solid enough, with a decent amount of gameplay. Is it worth $100? No, buy it on sale for like 30 or 40, but these people saying you are garbage for not believing that the Bethesda team needs to be lynched over this really need yo take their spoiled heads out of their collective ass.
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