The best review, as always, is to watch the first 20 minutes of gameplay to gauge whether you like it. I’m optimistic, and more than a little surprised at only a singular mention of glitches from a game developed by Bugthesda.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun - Edwin Evans-Thirlwell - Unscored
A short, sparky and colourful 2D PICO-8 blaster about a space captain fighting fascist robots.
This one is a parody/joke about someone who put a game on itch titled Starfield. Kind of shitty for RPS to allow. Especially since it’s directly connected on OpenCritic to Starfield the Bethesda game.
It’d be extremely unethical to score it. It’s still pretty bad to have added it to the 2023 Starfield opencritic page. A few reviewers no longer score their reviews because score in general is not a great way to recommend something. A blurb on recommendation is ideal. Like “If you are okay with X, Y, Z and are a fan of the genre then you might like Starfield.” Unscored reviews are becoming more common because of that.
Eh, it’s more that fun should be restricted to your own website. Not an aggregator website meant to show facts at a glance. Thus you are potentially ruining the factual glance.
Im near the end of BG3, and “stuck”: I’m just unwilling to end it. Happens often with RPGs for me. So a good time to take a break and play something else.
I bounce around between games a lot, so I was never going to be done before anything else came out, but they should definitely scratch different itches, also. They might both be big RPGs, but I fully expect to be able to play Starfield with stuff in the background and there's just too much narrative to do that with BG3. I also just itch for more actiony stuff at times (right now that's a 2D pixel art game called Chasm). Even if I drop 20 hours in a game before switching to the next one, one game isn't going to actually be the only one I play for that long, personally.
Yeah I feel this too with games that really hit me. You get so invested in your character and your playthrough that you don’t want to let go of your save, so instead of committing down the last stretch of main quest you maybe boot it up, scrounge out a fight somewhere or do some small remaining side quest, then run around town mindlessly a bit and shut down the game.
I had that happen with Cyberpunk earlier this year and I’m feeling it starting to set in with BG3. The allure of a second playthrough is stronger here, though, so that might help me stay the course.
"Once we head out, you won’t be able to return to your hometown for a while. Are you ready to leave?"
Yes
No
So many moments like this in RPGs that make it hard to leave just by saying that. I get so sad and I have to walk around saying goodbye to everyone in the whole area before I depart.
I’m in the last act and nearing the big bads… But bugs are getting more frequent. One of them allowed me to traverse the entire foundry without starting a fight. One bug wouldn’t let me remove one of the party members from my group after they got knocked unconscious and I couldn’t help them up.
So it’s been a slog of frequent saves and reloads. Still enjoying the game, though. And can’t wait to start a 2nd playthrough.
Patch 2 came out yesterday and was supposed to address some Act 3 issues. Have you played since then? I’ve also noticed some bugs in Act 3 but nothing gamebreaking thankfully.
Kind of interesting that the vast majority of negative/mixed reviews are regarding gameplay/story rather than complaining about major bugs (although jank has been noted in a few, and I’d honestly be a bit disappointed if there wasn’t any).
We’ll have to wait until release (Cyberpunk’s bugs weren’t that prominent in reviews either), but I really hope this “lol Bugthesda” meme can die.
Regardless of how buggy it is, I expect Dunkey to somehow break it as soon as he boots it up, which should be entertaining.
Skyrim for PS3 is in an unacceptable state to this day. The longer you play a save the worse the performance gets. My cousin finished the game at like 5 fps.
Fallout Nee Vegas has crash on startup issues day one on PC. Lots of folks couldn’t play it and I believe an unofficial patch came faster than an official.
Watching a few people play it on stream, they didn’t come across any bugs but the AI was making really silly choices still. Like Rushing a gunner with a melee weapon from far away. It’s essentially still the “Gary” AI. From everything I’ve seen, it’s going to be Fallout but you can drive the alien crashed spaceship to another planet.
As much as I love them, I’m about to be a hypocrite and say I don’t know if Bethesda will ever have non-janky AI. It’s the one thing that’s been fairly consistent over a very long time now.
Whether it’s enemies or your followers, or just pathfinding weirdness with NPCs, it’s like their AI is just kind of… there sometimes. If had a conspiracy theory about it, I’d say they’re doing it on purpose to get you to explore the world by finding your missing followers (of which I’m sure we’ll see many get stuck on different planets entirely now).
I mean it wasn't a meme. Bethesda games are buggy on release. The PS3 edition of Skyrim was notoriously not fit for release, I honestly do not think that level of bugs would ever have been tolerated nowawdays. It's also something that Microsoft's QA team really ought to be credited for because it seems they are the reason this game stands out amongst Bethesda releases in recent years.
That said imma wait till a few days afterwards just in case. And the story getting bad reviews is not unsurprising as Bethesda has not really had a good one since Morrowind, or maybe Point Lookout in F3.
You are right, but I just get tired of it sometimes as a “predictor” or that they should be lauded for not releasing something that falls apart at release.
Bethesda have a reputation for a reason, but the lack of QA (or at least publishers willing to listen to QA) in a lot of modern gaming has made some of Bethesda’s previous issues seem almost normal.
I guess that’s more an indictment of modern gaming than really a defense of Bethesda, lol. And for all the shit they get about “modders fixing their games”, they were the ones who actually went and fixed a lot of FO76’s issues after that launch disaster.
Either way, regarding the story… Yeah. I find that oftentimes the side quests (particularly faction quests or the FO4 follower quests) tend to be way more interesting than the main quest in some of their games.
The lolbugthesda meme exists because it’s true. There aren’t many games I’ve had to completely start over because of a game breaking glitch in a side quest, but that was Skyrim and the infamous thieves guild glitch.
They’re good games but pretending there are no bugs, either funny cosmetic ones or serious progress blocking ones, helps no one.
Sure. I don’t think I was pretending there weren’t any bugs. I think it’s more the dismissive approach toward their games before release that gets a bit tiring, even if it is often warranted in some respects.
Creation Engine is buggy as fuck, and I’ll always expect their games to have a fair amount of jank at the very least. Even Obsidian had troubles with it (though some of those bugs could also be attributed to lack of time and testing).
But I hope that if this does prove to be have better release than their others (admittedly, it can be a low bar), that it sticks.
I played from 5 pm yesterday at release until 5 am today, and I literally encountered one single bug, which was that I managed to get a big enemy’s pathing hung up on a rock, so I could kill it.
Honestly, most “professional” game reviews are made by average joe gamers who happen to have a platform to broadcast their thoughts. Most of these writers are not expert players nor are they always well versed in the genre of the game they’re reviewing.
I never understand why people put so much stock into them when their opinions are no more valid than any random person on the internet.
I think I’ve grown past enjoying Bethesda’s wide, shallow ocean design philosophy and bare-bones dialogue trees. There are simply better RPGs on the market now.
I want to agree but... what other RPGs on the market fill this niche of a sandboxy open world that you can practically live in? Skyrim and Fallout feel like proper open world immersive sims at moments. Cyberpunk might be the closest one in recent memory but it fails in so many other aspects. Other than that I honestly can't think of anything.
Yup, they just keep making the same game with a new map and skins. Everyone had such insane hopes for this game, but I always assumed it’d be at best like fallout 3, better graphics in space.
It’s because Nintendo still haven’t implement server client networking and host their own dedicated servers. It’s why people paid Nintendo Online to play multiplayer Nintendo games are getting scammed.(even Capcom or EA/Epic did batter job on switch then Nintendo.)
That’s why you get no real online plays, blame Nintendo’s internal policy, not networking complexity.
Sounds kinda interesting, but the bar to live up to (to me) will be Elite Dangerous, which seems rather high. I might pick it up on sale, but I’m a bit worried at how close this will be to Skyrim; engine, dialog, and quest-wise.
Landing and taking off and all of that is all done in a menu. You don’t fly the ship at all during that time. The only time you fly is during those space combat parts. You don’t fly around systems and planets and stuff.
It’s nothing like Elite, or Freelancer, or even No Man’s Sky.
Remember Super Mario Maker 2? It included a mode where players could join an online room, whether with friends or strangers, to play courses among themselves. It’s also infamous for the constant slowdowns that players experienced during the courses. Why was this happening, you may wonder? Well, because the players needed to synchronize their state between each other, and since the game was not designed with modern network tools in mind such as rollback (which would probably be too heavy for the Switch), the only way to ensure everyone was on the same lane was to wait for everyone to receive the input data from all other players. And in a game with up to four players at a time, things are absolutely going to get messy.
Everything you stated has been solved in so many games in the past decade. People keep making excuses for it. Smash bros for example.
But the real reason? Nintendo just never really cared about multiplayer for Mario. Multiplayer’s not a big money maker for Mario, and they’ll implement just enough to hit whatever.
And I’m okay with that. Because I play Mario games solo or couch op.
Right? I kept hearing people say things like “it’s a precise physics game with player collision” and my only retort is “the fuck is a smash bros to you?” And that game worked way better even without rollback. Imagine a Mario with it.
Bullshit, there are already multiple games on the Switch that use rollback. I’ve never benchmarked different methods, but I doubt it’s that resource-intensive. We’ve had implementations for decades at this point. The Switch isn’t significantly less powerful than CPUs from old PCs that ran games with rollback. If anything, it’s more powerful, due to advances in CPU design and having a separate GPU.
It’s all about that Japanese yen. If Nintendo can save ¥100 here or there, they will. It’s disappointing, because it feels like they miss so many obvious ideas as a result, though.
A mission might send you to the other side of the vast starmap, but the actual travel time between systems is always the same (and the poorly explained fuel system, which is actually just your range, isn’t much of a limitation). When I discovered that so much of space flight is effectively a series of non-interactive cutscenes, it largely shattered the illusion of exploring a vast universe. It’s impossible not to compare Starfield to the way you freely enter and exit planets’ atmosphere in No Man’s Sky, so it’s a bit of a letdown every time you see a planet and remember it’s just a picture of a planet you’ll never be able to reach by flying toward it. It’s something that happens a lot.
The fact that you can’t fly over to planets and land, and that you get around the vastness of space by simply fast traveling, is disappointing. This seems less space-y, and more like Fallout-y to me.
As someone who isn’t really into FPS games these days, I think I might give Starfield a skip.
Just played for a few hours on my Steam Deck and yeah it does feel a lot like Fallout, but with extra steps. It’s very polished and I’m sure I’ll have a lot of fun with it eventually, but so far I’ve been disappointed with the little I’ve seen.
I got the game for free though, so I don’t feel too bad lol
And I’d argue that even in No Man’s Sky it’s not as fun as one would want it to be; sure it’s “seamless” but it’s also more or less just a glorified loading screen. Turns out there just isn’t much meaningful gameplay you can do while moving from one place to another through empty space across vast distances especially when the game has to work in the background to load and unload everything.
But at least it’s immersive. In something like Skyrim you at least have something to look at, or in Fallout you can marvel at the desolate landscape that’ll be different everywhere you go. Space is just that, space. Which is why in, say, Mass Effect it works well, because you get to explore your ship and talk to the crew between missions and that’s fun, while the travel is minimized (though still just loading screens).
Which is why in, say, Mass Effect it works well, because you get to explore your ship and talk to the crew between missions and that’s fun, while the travel is minimized
This is exactly what I was expecting. I mean, I’m not asking of hours of travel thru endless space, they could’ve employed wormholes to cut the travel time, but still make the distance seem… distant, a bit more believable and immersive. It could only be a few minutes of travel if you take the wormhole into consideration, but there’s so much you can do to fill that time. Like the spaceships are vast, so you could be assigned activities to do around the ship, like maintenance and minor upgrades, or maybe you could access the ship’s various computer terminals to do stuff - could even have various mini games, or just a mini spaceship RPG type elements, similar to some of the Star Trek games. Just because space is vast and empty doesn’t mean you’re just sitting there and staring at darkness.
Or maybe I had my expectations too high and was expecting a space sim, which this clearly isn’t.
Tbh it’s worse than fallout. In fallout you didn’t have loading screens every 15 minutes. Going from planet to planet is just a loading screen after loading screen and some additional meaningless steps like “get out of spaceship”. It’s a Bethesda game but with worse exploration mechanics. But now we know what fallout/tes in space from bethesda is gonna be like.
Otherwise it’s decent. Mind you I haven’t gotten far but story is kind of interesting, side stories(the larger ones) as well. I think they did a good job with lore. Can’t say anything against shooty combat, don’t know about melee.
I just wish there was less garbage to pick up. In a game where you can gather materials for crafting and projects etc, where you are in a room with 20 object you can take but just 2 of them are not trash it’s tiresome
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