All game content and story issues aside, what pisses me of the most is that a month after release, we still only had a microscopic amount of bugfixes that don't even address some of the larger issues with the game.
I don't want to bring up BG3 again, but at this timespan after the game release, Larian already fixed THOUSANDS of bugs, big and small and overall, the game was much less obviously buggy than Starfield is. It's issues were more inconsistencies in logic and a handful of quest breakers, but otherwise not even noticeable until you read the patch notes.
It's crazy to me there's so little action from Bethesdas side in fixing this heap. I guess it rolls into their bullshit PR of pushing for Awards (they are literally looking to get a Grammy ...) and saying the game is nigh on perfect.
When has Bethesda ever released patches to fix anything short of game breaking bugs? And even then more often than not they don’t fix those.
I mean, some of the most popular mods for fallout 4 and skyrim were community patches. I’m not saying I agree with that practice, just that this is par for the (shitty) course for Bethesda. Starfield probably won’t be an actually good game until there are thousands of mods for it.
I’d wager technical debt is the reason. It’s no secret that Bethesda’s engine is bad. Bad code makes it harder to do bug-fixes, because it’s harder to find the root cause of things and the risks of having accidental side-effects is far higher. There’s only so many hacks and emergency fixes you can slap into a codebase before it becomes a house of cards that collapses if you breathe on it the wrong way.
The engine is what makes the games so great though, no other engine I know is so flexible and open for mods, while at the same time can keep states for huge numbers of game objects that can be manipulated and moved freely in the whole Game world. Yes it has limitations but I am happy to live with those in exchange for what it enables. It is more then a fair trade in my eyes.
“This is the way it’s always been done” is also the same rhetoric bigots use to justify racism. Just because Bethesda has always sucked ass doesn’t mean anyone likes it or wants them to continue to suck ass.
What the fuck are you on about? I’m not defending Bethesda. I’m saying that if a company makes games with the exact same kind of flaws every time - getting upset when they do it again suggests the issue might be with the inability to make basic inference.
It’s like if you don’t like chocolate, buy a bar of chocolate, and going “Gah! This one has chocolate too!”.
They didn’t rewrite the creation engine. It’s going to have the same feeling and issues as other games made with that engine. It wouldn’t have to be this way if they had done a good job. But, they don’t seem to have to do that for a lot of people to enjoy their games. But being surprised by it? Nah, that’s on you (figuratively)
Being disappointed requires unmet expectation. “Surprised”. Why don’t you pick a word you prefer that conveys unmet expectations? I think you know perfectly well what I mean. And if you don’t, then, well, I’m not here to argue.
Bethesda has a bad reputation and still sells so they don’t need to fix it. Their reputation is to make games with the things you outlined specifically
I’m almost certain most of the team went on vacation after launch. However, that should probably be over by now and there still hasn’t been much of anything as far as I’m aware.
Please explain the larger issues with the game. I have like 50 hours into it and the only things I’ve noticed were 1 glitched quest (Madam Devine won’t progress, which was fixed with 1 command) and some companion bonuses not applying. Also my chameleon-wearing companion’s head would remain invisible sometimes! But largely the game has played well. It’s great to bitch and moan but what actual bugs are you talking about, because personally I haven’t seen them!
Rarely, outposts can become unbuildable. You have to save and reload
The bounty system is slightly more jank than I’m used to. Sometimes I’ll get a 15000 bounty for a stealth kill while unseen - those 15000 bounties never go away from witness death. Other times a 650 bounty that immediately goes away from “last witness died”. I had to save-scum a pirate ship because it happened with some specific folks, and I solved it by chucking a grenade into the bridge. I commented elsewhere, grenades are super-stealth and you usually get away with throwing a grenade in full view in a crowded room if you can hide before it blows up.
I’d like to see #2 fixed/improved, but honestly don’t mind either very much.
I had to use a cheat and kill a achievements because into the unknown was bugged. Where the temple should have spawned there was a mining rig and the scanner never distorted. It’s a pretty common issue reported over and over again on their discord (which is a freaking horrible way to deal with support BTW). And then on the final quest one of the mini bosses clipped through an elevator and I had to wait like 10 mins while he decided to teleport behind me.
I saw a bit of those on stream and thought maybe the time affected the quality of the result… but no. It’s just filler shit to get your space dragon speech spell or whatever. Then the enemies are all bullet sponges. It all seemed very transparent and very familiar.
Sounds cool, but in practice it might be just more things to do for huge regiments while those who dont want to dedicate their entire lives to the game or join some big group barely get to even see the things. I hope i’m wrong.
Are you new to Bethesda games or it has just been a while? 🙂
I remember starting Skyrim for the first time and making it as far as the character selection screen (well, after spending a few hours fixing the no-voices bug) at which point I went wtf is this crap and went looking for mods.
The original vanilla Skyrim was pretty terrible. Don’t get me wrong it was playable but it was a very forgettable and unimpressive game. The low quality assets, the bugs, the half-assed talent trees, the uninspired and unfinished quest lines, the dumb AI, the barren ugly towns and landscapes etc. Just think about all the things you have to fix nowadays with mods to play it properly, nevermind adding new stuff.
But it is facts In talking about. Nobody in their right mind will pretend there weren’t bugs, or that the quests or talent trees or crafting or alchemy were well made, or that the AI was good etc.
All you’re saying is that you liked the game in spite of all that — either that or you can’t even remember how bad it was before the mods.
Skyrim’s greatest virtue will always be how moddable it is. But that still doesn’t mean that Bethesda put out a great game in 2011.
Nobody’s said the game was flawless, but I, at least, never experienced any bugs or design issues that detracted from the overall incredible experience.
Nobody in their right mind will pretend there weren’t bugs, or that the quests or talent trees or crafting or alchemy were well made
You’re conflating facts with opinion. I thought the quests and perk trees were, for the most part, very well made.
Someone yesterday said they don’t buy Bethesda games because they’re good at launch, instead they buy them because the modding community is so prolific.
Paying $60-70 for a game that requires teams of unpaid volunteers to make it playable after launch.
Mods exist now and have since day one. They’ve already made the game much better, but you are right they arent great yet cause they dont have the GECK. I do like to have a sort of “vanilla” playthrough before super mods. I didn’t clarify that.
Yeah kinda. I bought it to play the stock game with a few tweaks. But when creation kit comes out I’ll be back. And then again. And again.
People have thousands of hours into skyrim. You think that game has more than 100 hours of content? It’s years of going back and enjoying mods and the community surrounding them.
Yeah Bethesda profits off it. But you’d be surprised how many people pirated the game, eventually just buying the “goty” edition on sale.
Tbf vanilla Skyrim had more than 100 hours of content, just not story driven. Back when it came out I played well over that on PS3 in a single save with no mods. I explored every dragon shrine and collected all the priest masks in that playthrough. I did loot every damm vase though and inventory mgmt was slow. I got crafting up to 100 naturally, etc. Then made new characters eventually. Im sure I spent more than 300 hours over the years before I went to PC and installed mods
Modders generally only make mods for games that they are enthausiastic for. Its not a given that Starfield will have a modding scene on par with Skyrim.
No, not a given you are right. But regardless whether its on par with skyrim I’m interested in what they do the same way I was with fallout 4 despite not thinking that game was particularly good myself.
How did you get around how empty the game is? I played a few hours but it is just so empty. Being in a city just means either quick travelling or walking through 100s of meters without any interesting npc or anything at all. I felt skyrim did it much better.
Most people have talked about how empty things are by talking about the planets. I feel like that part feels too full if anything. They aren’t empty enough to give it character. The same goes for almost every other locations. They’re so full of junk that they’re empty of character.
I am waiting for official mod support to make it into a real game. There are so many awesome mods and I’ve tried a few but I’m too lazy to manually install them. Also I’m so not going to go through the storyline amount 9 times…
Factorio has a mod manager built in. It can browse, download, install mods all right there. It even syncs mods to save files and checks for updates. Factorio mods have better support than most games do. I really wish some other developers would put that kind of effort into mods. Just think of what, say, Minecraft could be if it had that.
Likewise the Paradox launcher has pretty good mod support. I think you have to add mods externally, but you can create profiles and things where one profile could be for The World of Darkness games and another could be for Game of Thrones, or whatever. You can easily swap between them without any trouble.
Somewhere in the vast chasm between “these are the best gameplay element ever conceived” and “this crap cannot be enjoyable with these left in” lies the actual description of their impact for a normal person.
They are perhaps marginally tedious. It bothered one modder enough that he modded them out with a mod that has about 7600 unique downloads. It bothered millions of others so little that they…just played the game anyway.
omg. I’m just 15 hours in, haven’t discovered temples yet, but that seems unconscionable. Like, MMO levels of grind. I mean, I’ve happily put hundreds of hours into each TES-offline, FO-offline, Deus Ex, CP2077, BG3. I don’t mind repetitive if the mechanic is fun.
MMO grind is for when you expect your customers to spend hundreds of hours just hanging out with their friends and you need to find something for them to do. It doesn’t have to be fun or rewarding, just distracting. Maybe TESO and FO76 have distorted their priorities.
The “puzzle” is that when you enter the temple, it goes zero-g and a spinny thing in the middle pops up. You have to float to a thing that looks like a spinning top, and once you float through it, another one appears. You float through a dozen of them or so and then you get a space power. Such a colossal failure of game design that this was acceptable to have as any puzzle, but the audacity to make it literally the same puzzle at every other temple completely boggles my mind.
240 times. Sometimes a dude appears when you leave the temple, and he’ll shoot at you. There are better puzzles on the kids menu at Denny’s.
The number isn’t really the issue. The issue is that every single one is exactly the same. Skyrim had like 80? words of power but they were fun because you had to beat a boss or clear a dungeon or do a quest. In Skyrim you got at least some personal touch to getting those words.
In Starfield it’s always the same 1-2 minute walk from ship to temple and then float around in a small room until the central thing opens and then you get teleported outside the temple where you kill 1 guy that 90% of the time spawns directly in front of you. If it was as many times as in Skyrim it would still be mind numbingly boring, because there’s nothing interesting about them.
To 100% it, yes. It has to be done ever several new game cycles so you’ll also have to go through the other shit multiple times too. I don’t think anyone is expected to do that though. The new game plus stuff undermines the outpost system though. It’ll be gone your next cycle, so just don’t bother I guess? The ideal meta progression would be to rush through the main story and complete all the temples on your cycle then move on.
I played the game 40+h without any mods and had a lot of fun. It is very much enjoyable without mods. Can mods make the game better? Yes, sure Are the mods needed to have fun with the game? Absolutely not.
For my curiosity, what on Earth could you possibly do for those 40 hours? Cause for me that’s about 5 times more than it’s worth spending with the game in its current state.
I’m 60 hours in and haven’t touched the outpost, ship building, or equipment modding. Main quest and 2 faction side quests completed. I’ve enjoyed my time and bought the game with the expectation that it would be FO4 with some things improved some things worse and a new setting.
There are definitely failings and it’s not a 10/10 game but for a lot of people it’s a great game. The proc gen system needs more variety but that can be improved through updates and mods. If you prefer handcrafted content follow the quests and you’ll see minimal repeats of the POIs. I don’t regret my purchase one bit and would be fine if no DLC, mods, or updates happen even though I prefer they do. End of the day make your own decision based on what you like just realize it’s not a dumpster fire and not the perfect game that everyone should run out and play.
I did more or less like you. I tried the outpost a bit, but when I realized they were irrelevant (same with modification and ship building) I just continued the main quest.
The dame has flaws, and I generally don’t buy games when they just come out, but I’m not disappointed in this purchase, despite the flaws of the game.
Lots of cool side quests, a main quest that is one of the best from Bethesda, exploring the universe. And yes even the power puzzles from time to time to unlock a new power. I have about 100h (hard to say as steam is not logging the time for me anymore because I use mod manager and sfse) now (started with modding after entering NG+ at about 40h and still find new fun things to do. I am in NG+2 at the moment.
Mods I use are mostly cosmetic (I love to change some posters or magazine covers when ich switch NG+) or QoL like faster animations or better UI.
I have 60 hours in and just got to the temples. There’s a ton of things to do. I’ll probably get 100 hours into the base game and then many, many more hours from mods.
You keep asking this in this thread. What answer do you want? The game has a shitload of content in it. I’m 35ish hours in and I have so many random quests and things to do. I’ve spent hours wandering around planets. Around cities. In space stations. Scanning things, reading stuff.
It’s completely fine if what the game has to offer doesn’t appeal to you, but if you truly cannot comprehend how anyone could enjoy it, then I’m afraid you just don’t have much perspective.
This is, objectively speaking, a large scale open world game with hundreds of hours of content. It should be self evident that what it has to offer will appeal to some and not to others. How can you think that because it doesn’t appeal to you, it shouldn’t appeal to anyone? That makes no sense.
Absolutely. It really depends what you want to do. Jump straight into the frontline meat grinder and you’ll be able to dip out whenever you like. You could even do some basic logistics runs in that time. Start building bases or factories and that’s when there’s a huge time commitment lol
“Multi-person” doesn’t do it justice. The battleships are designed to be run with a deck crew of 16+. Submarines 8, and destroyers 12+.
It’s going to be a major task of coordination for these things to be run. I’ve seen players have a hard time coordinating tanks, and that’s usually just a driver and a gunner.
There’s that game with untextured polygonal graphics about naval combat that’s aimed towards having several players running a carrier. Dammit, what’s the name of that?
I’d love an open world game where you start as a Star Trek ship and just explore for hundreds of hours, stumbling upon adventures/civilizations taken directly from the massive repo of lore that exists from all the shows.
Have you tried Bridge Commander or the not actually star trek, but still totally star trek game Artemis?
They’re basically that. Randomly generated scenarios where you, and a few friends, command a Starfleet vessel to solve dilemmas or just exist in the world. The fun is mostly in the MP aspect (though Bridge Commander can be played solo), and the missions are pretty samey and mostly explained through text briefings. But it really feels like being on the bridge of the Enterprise.
This game feels more like a chore with a million fetch quests. I never made it out of new Atlantis in my play through. Bg3 is so much more nuance and a way better game.
Yeah I don’t know why they can’t make space travel to work similar to NMS. That would have been so much better. I don’t really feel like I’m exploring anything jumping from system to system. Hell even planets to planets.
Yeah I don’t know why they can’t make space travel to work similar to NMS
Because the Creation Engine is a pile of shit stacked on top of another pile of shit known as Gamebryo. The only way it even is able to handle high speed vehicles for the space combat is by having much smaller external cells with absolutely nothing in them.
What they could have done, though, is make the planets fully walkable. For some reason, those are also not seamless. You eventually hit invisible walls in any sector you land at. The engine is very capable of handling that, though. Especially if it’s just empty terrain.
Seriously, I wish they had dropped that engine. It’s so hodge podge and lacking, they had a decade to make starfield in a new to them engine. Instead we get this shit in 2023
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