I disagree purely on the point that what Starfield is, more than anything else, an amazing platform to make a mod on. Not a great game per se, but the setting and overall theme leave a lot of room for Bethesda to cash in on the work of others as is tradition.
I love that steam reviews can make companies take notice and is harder to shove away compared to other types of reviews with how it’s always there on the store page.
Hot take: Alan Wake 2 would have a lot of explaining to do if EPIC had a review system. My disappointment with that game was immeasurable and my weekend was ruined.
Hmm, I haven’t played it. I avoid everything epic store stuff (even though I would have gotten it for free, since I’m childhood friends with one of the devs). So I’m curious, what’s the problem? I’ve heard like three people say that it’s their game of the year already, so I’m curious what’s the issue for you?
I’d love to hear why, personally. Wasn’t a huge fan of Alan Wake 1, so the huge outcry for the sequel has been a bit odd for me, and would like to hear the other side of the coin.
It was a heart warming situation when I saw Blizzard’s game get mixed reviews. They didn’t release games anywhere else until now and getting a reality check was a much needed thing for them.
Maybe we should have two ratings? Saying its a flop is vague, yes it mostly means it didn’t sell, but why? In this case, I didn’t even hear about it there are so many millions of games. But is it a good game regardless? Is it fun to play? These types of headlines don’t really answer that and just push negative press.
It reviewed pretty poorly, but that's no guarantee.
I have to say, even with a good game it would suck to release something kinda niche this year, and the Warhammer brand means so little these days, games under that release through a firehose at this point, it's hard to know what's coming up, let alone if it's any good.
Well with Warhammer games, its 90% RTS, 8% one-offs like Boltgun, and the other 2% is the Tide games. They don’t like to take risks or move to far away from the table top and mostly leave that up to brave studios who get a license. The market is prime for a WH40K soulslike right now.
There's a bunch more than that, and many just... come and go and often people don't even notice.
I mean, come on, how many people on this thread wouldn't even have known this game existed if Frontier wasn't slightly higher profile than most devs working on these?
The 40K soulslike idea is... probably gonna happen eventually, I dunno. I'm not a big soulslike guy. Hey, maybe Space Marine 2 is good. Looks nice, anyway.
For what it's worth, what I really would like to see is a 40K game that is not about the space theocratic fascists for once. I should go back to play the Dawn of War sequel that nobody remembers happened, either, since that was the last time you got Eldar as a faction. And even then only because it was a throwback game to the first Dawn of War.
An open-world game where you are the target of the Imperium’s xenophobia and hatred would probably be pretty hot right now considering world events. But GW would be way too scared to make the Imperium the actual antagonists of a piece of media because space marines are their cash cow.
If that entire franchise's fanbase needs a sanity check for a reason, it's for that.
I know they look cool and they're easy to paint because of all the flat surfaces, but come on.
It's fine for your dark fantasy setting to have no good guys. It's EXTREMELY not fine for your dark fantasy theocratic racists to become the good guys and for you to do nothing to stop it from happening.
Honestly, the Orks may be the most intellectually honest faction in that whole mess. They mostly just like to fight and think everybody else is a dick. And they're right.
But nah, when teenage me came to the idea of haughty, elitist space elves in hoverbikes there was never any other option. But they're not the good guys. Nobody should be the good guys in that. ESPECIALLY not the human factions.
That might be where most people have a problem. This may be completely anecdotal, but it seems a majority of people want things to be black and white. They want their villians easily identifiable, they want their heroes as pure as the first oxygen molecule. That may be why a lot of fans seem to choose the Space Marines as the “good guys” in a galaxy where there are none. I’ll never understand it cause its boring, put that yin in my yang and vice versa. I want stained heroes and misguided antagonists. I want a pain in my heart as it tries to decide who to root for.
Those are even after my time. From the outside it looked like them starting to step away from "fantasy races in space", but it didn't intrigue me enough to pay attention and they never really became the core of the videogames because space marines everywhere, so...
I miss Games like Starbound. So much to see and do. Unbelievable good atmospheric Music under a Sky full of Stars while building you first Base. This was one, if not the, first game to give me a feeling of smallness in comparison to the Universe.
I also loved starbound. My problem was the late game became very gamey, with the linear planet tier progression to get better materials. Once I got past the progression and beat the final boss there was nothing fun left to do, even with all the base building stuff they put in.
I really enjoyed these “Space-Dungeons” where you could Upgrade your Weapons at the End or get a Terraforming Device for an Emerald-Forrest Biome or something like that.
Management response: Dear customer, thank you for taking the time to try our cake. This is a cake, which is sweet and tasty by definition. We made the cake so customers can enjoy the cake and taste the typical cake ingredients which taste sweet and tasty. The cake experience as we created should appeal to everyone because cake is tasty.
How they implemented it it is you can’t get a strong item if you pick-up the item box while being stopped (like as it respawns with no forward speed), by going in reverse or picking up the same one multiple times.
On the one hand I'm always excited for more Witcher. On the other hand Cyberpunk 2077. More seriously, I hope they make a great game and it that lives up to the expectations people are going to have for a new Witcher game, but I'm keeping my expectations in check until I see the finished product.
I’m hoping the initial backlash from cyberpunk actually registered with them. Other than that I’m also worried about what kind of story and characters they’ll use considering the way the last dlc for witcher 3 ended. Not sure I’ll be into Ciri based gameplay. That was my least favorite part of Witcher 3, and I don’t really want them to retcon the end of blood and wine either to continue with Geralt.
I could see them doing interesting things with Ciri’s magic, but there is a good chance they use a different witcher. Or maybe significantly earlier than the existing witcher games? Young Geralt or maybe Vesimir?
They need to go back in time to when all the witcher schools were still going and you can choose which school you’re a part of at the beginning, make your own witcher instead of one playable character.
That sounds really bad on paper, tbh. The cool parts about the player character all stem from how it’s a defined person with an existing personality and place in the world. If it becomes Skyrim: Witcher Edition, we’d probably also inherit the shallow~inexistent storytelling of that.
What if it becomes Baldurs Gate 3: Witcher Edition? BG3 also has a player created character without an existing personality and the storytelling is certainly not shallow in that game.
Yeah but one of the biggest pitfalls is seeing another company catch lightning in a bottle, then thinking that this can be freely recreated. Just that BG3 could do a user-created character with a good story does not at all imply that any other company can do it. Nevermind will. Or even that Larian can do it again.
While I do kinda agree with you, I think CDPR is a lot better at writing interesting quests and characters than Bethesda. Still not as good as larien but I don’t think it would be todd Howard bad.
I’d love that. Sure they’d have to really re-do her combat style since it was only a brief intermission before, but it feels natural to progress to her eventually. And honestly, it’s high time Geralt takes a bow after 3 games as big as they are, and as awesome as those were. Exit before they eventually ruin him. 😅
Cyberpunk’s patching has showed me that ~1-1,5 years after release is a really good time to jump in.
By which time, between patches and mods, the worst stuff is dealt with and the experience can be really nice, if a bit tepid due to bad design decisions that mods cannot fix. Still, enjoyable game after patches and at a discount.
Witcher 3 is probably my favourite game of all time, largely because of the semi-parental storyline with Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri. That said, I think the weakness with the Witcher 1-3 series as a whole is that the plot is too complex. Since most modern AAA RPGs have many, many side quests, I think the main plot of a long RPG should be relatively simple or else risk diluting its dramatic effect.
I feel like CD Projekt Red did a better job with that aspect of story-telling in Cyberpunk, even if the overall emotional arc is less intense than that of Witcher 3. There are lots of cool things to do and interesting side quests in Cyberpunk, but the main arc is pretty simple. You can go off on hours of side quests and still come back to the main plot without forgetting what’s going on.
A step back in what sense? Technically? Yeah probably. Starfield is the first Bethesda game to have working ladders(one slight sort of exception in Fallout 4) lol. But in terms of story, and world building, I think it’s fair to say Starfield is much ahead in that.
That’d be more meaningful if Bethesda had ever managed to create a story with any worth. Sometimes the bones of a decent story are there, but the execution is usually amateur hour.
In my opinion Starfield has the best story Bethesda has written. Not entirely saying much, but the main story and the side stories are at least more interesting and less predictable that Fallout 4 and Skyrim quests.
Assuming you haven’t already, you should give Morrowind a shot. If you can get past the dated graphics and mechanics, the story is by far Bethesda’s best work imho.
Yeah, I have played Morrowind(well actually TES3MP) and in terms of flexibility and story Morrowind is definitely great, my issue is that my least favorite aspect of Bethesda games are the tedious winding dungeons(why NV and Starfield are my favorite because they have the least of that) and Morrowind unfortunately has a lot. One aspect of Morrowind that I really enjoyed actually though, was the opportunity to be given information to actually take notes on(I wrote down directions quest givers gave for example) and Starfield was the only other Bethesda game I’ve played with a taste of that. Although unfortunately much less.
Man, feels like we played totally different games regarding Morrowind. Most of Morrowind’s dungeons are the smallest of any Bethesda game, and honestly it had the least amount of quests that even sent you to dungeons. Still, if you found them tedious you found them tedious. (anychance you installed other mods besides MP?)
All the same, I think the story is by far Bethesda’s magnum opus. (I mean Bethesda proper, since New Vegas was Obsidian and all)
And while I find exploration in Starfield to be extremely tedious, I will say they employed a “Skyrim/FO4” style sensibility where each dungeon should roughly take 10-20 minutes, making for nice bite sized chunks of gameplay.
I completely agree that NV had stellar use of dungeons that almost never overstayed their welcome.
Though if you want real tedium, in both winding dungeons and exploration, give Daggerfall unity a try. Great game, but my god does it go on and on and on.
It also bugs me that Bethesda keeps saying that the game is about exploration and finding new planets, but so far every planet I’ve visited has some kind of building upon it. Its clear that people have been on this planet before, so why the hell should I explore this planet? At least give me some incentive or a better reward for finding a true empty planet.
You’re not wrong, but OTOH, it’s pretty funny to see a planet having a building on it equated to the planet being explored, considering Earth was still being explored thousands of years after the first buildings.
Yeah thats true. In Bethesda’s dictionary exploration means: find minerals, 7 life forms and 3 unique geological formations. And by unique we mean like on the other planets.
I hope it gets all the love and care The Witcher series and its fans deserve. They are going to have to make up a lot of ground with consumers to get back to W3 standards though.
I hope the praise heaped on Cyberpunk 2077 now doesn’t let them forget the absolute shitshow of a launch so that they don’t try to rush out the next game half-baked as well.
I think the biggest problem for Cyberpunk was that they also released it on last gen consoles which cost them many resources that could’ve otherwise been used to polish the game for the other platforms.
They also flat out lied about what kind of game it is right until the release. They promised NPCs with their own lives and incredibly intricate dialogue choices that have ripple effects on the whole game. Nothing like that is in the game, even now.
I have played most of the fully 3D Bethesda RPG games and I am accustomed to their game design, bugs, and janks.
But the only thing I hate about Starfield is just the way the game always talks about how amazing exploration of the unknown is (heck, your main character is even a part of the explorer group name Constellation) while trying everything it can to stop player to do just that (overly rely on teleportation, cannot travel seamlessly between planets, etc…)
It feels like you are playing an institute scientist in an fallout game, always stay in your high tech base and only travel using teleportation to the outside world
This is a major turn off for me and there is no way to fix it
100%. The best part of Bethesda open world games is exploring the open space between towns, quests, objectives, etc. Fast travel is an option, but rarely necessary. If you rely on it you will miss lots of cool stuff.
Not so in Starfield, the space between objectives is literally empty space.
And space travel isnt actually a fun adventure, but the point of a video game is to romanticize the concepts. Not make them as boring and realistic as possible
I agree. Unless that’s the whole point of the game you are making, and then it’s just the nature of the game. Flight Sim is one of my friend’s favorite games, but not so for me. At least they aren’t telling people that they are wrong about it being boring because it’s realistic and realism is better or some crap.
There is, in fact, a very heated debate on whether or not simulators that stay true to form are actually games. With the argument being, they are either toys or simulators.
“I had fun playing with it” isnt exclusive to games, as a ball is not a game but I would gladly throw it against a wall for hours by myself with some music.
But lots of people would likely shit on an attempt to rebrand those things as “video toys” when the distinction is largely only relevant to people studying design, so the heated debate is mostly between academics and pedants.
There’s lots of actual stuff in interplanetary space that you can pull on for inspiration on how to make an interesting game.
You can have counters with shady trader types that are only in the vast gulf between the systems, there could be rogue planets with billion year old abandoned cities to explore filled with automated defences for you to fight and interesting loot at the end. Distant ancient asteroids that contain the seeds of the first life in the universe that when you interact with temporarily give you status change that you can only get from asteroids and temporarily gives you super strength or something, allowing you to complete missions in a way you otherwise would not necessarily have done.
The way these kind of side quests are supposed to work is the player is plodding along trying to get from point A to point B and on the way they get sidetracked by this side quest (the clue is in the name Bethesda). Maybe it changes their priorities or how they’re going to tackle and upcoming mission. Side quests are not supposed to be independent standalone things, they’re supposed to integrate with the main story. They’re not supposed to be something you find easily there’s supposed to be something you come across on your own as you’re exploring the environment, but you can only do that if the developers bothered to provided environment for you to explore. If they just teleport you to your destination then there’s no opportunity for this kind of emergent gameplay.
Loads of stuff you can put between the star systems.
That’s a fair opinion to have, but my preference is actually exploring the towns. I love that Starfield removed many of the middle of nowhere winding dungeons that I got so bored of. (Dwemer/Nord ruins in Skyrim and office buildings/other skyscrapers in fallout 4.)
Yeah it’s quite an accomplishment to make the vastness of space feel claustrophobic and small.
Some of the response to the reviews is bizarre - one seems to try to claim that the planets are not boring because they’re realistic and the real world is boring, and that the player is probably just overwhelmed by the awesomeness of it all.
It almost feels like the game Devs have convinced themselves that they’ve been working on the greatest game ever made and when told “no you haven’t” they’re responding by saying “you just don’t get our vision”.
It’s an ok game. I’m actually less bothered by the loading screens and more by the old fashioned story telling. This game would have been amazing if released closer after Skyrim. But it’s been 12 years and we’ve had Witcher 3, Cyberpunk and Baldurs Gate 3 that have changed expectations. All of them are better at evoking a sense of emotional engagement with the game, and actions having meaningful consequences in the plot. Subplots like the bloody baron in Witcher 3, or Judy in cyberpunk have stuck with me in a way characters and events in Skyrim and now Starfield just never have.
Problem is I suspect Bethesda will focus on all the loading screen / sense of scale complaints and not register the more important (imo) issues with the stories, characters and gameplay. Less but better is the real lesson I think.
Funny thing is, they don’t care. As long as they have fans who will complain but still buy their product at full price… they simply don’t care. This is evident with every product of theirs. Fallout76 had bugs originating from FO4 that were patched by community but were reintroduced in FO76.
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