Screwed over? What promised stuff didn’t 76 deliver on?
For me it seemed like Bethesda wasn’t entirely sure what they wanted from 76, except that they wanted to create a multiplayer version of Fallout, and make money on micro-transactions. Todd tried to drag it in the PvP direction, which was ridiculous when its their first multiplayer and fallout haven’t exactly been known for being balanced. Someone internally dragged it in the coop PvE direction, someone else towards roleplaying and building. And after a backlash, they reacted by focusing on getting NPCs in and on PvE coop. And house building because that sold.
I liked the initial story personally. The changed story with NPCs became too disjointed from the world already built. And had no driving force in it. No reason to care except seeing one faction win.
Man some people just can’t be pleased. I’ve been playing the game all week, and it’s fantastic. It delivered exactly what I thought it was going to be.
Sure there are some bugs, and some complaints about a few minor things, but as a whole this game is spot on.
I’m just not sure what people are expecting. It’s Fallout/Skyrim in space, and it’s exactly what I thought it was going to be.
I agree that it’s a fun game – about what I expected as well (no bugs for me, though) – but my major issue with the game is that the lore is so damn boring. Unlike in past titles like New Vegas and Oblivion, I find myself skipping through the dialogue in this one so that I can go back to enjoying the game. The game doesn’t give me any reason to care about these various factions and their internal drama. Nobody ever has anything interesting or funny to say in Starfield ever. I never once felt the need to dig deeper into the lore like I do with Fallout, reading timelines and listening to developer insight and whatnot. I just skip skip skip.
Also there’s the fact that space travel is done almost entirely through menus. The only time you actually have to fly your ship is during dogfights.
If it weren’t for those two things, this would be a 9/10 game for me. I love the massive cities, how many mods there are already, and gunplay is satisfying once you tweak the damage values to make everyone less of a bullet sponge (Including yourself). Can’t wait to see what the future holds for this game once we start getting DLC and story mods.
I just did a quest where the New Frontier and the UC put aside their differences in war to fight a common enemy. The dialog was all touching and mused on the equality of each soldier in a war.
Meanwhile I’m over here like “Dude, I have no honest idea what dumb reason there is that you two idiots are even at war with each other, and you’re writing the dumbest WW1 Christmas story I’ve heard.”
tbf this is pretty par for the course with Bethesda, the writing just isn’t good. The people that wrote Morrowind and most of Oblivion left half way through Oblivion, from what I remember Todd Howard did not get along with the writers at all.
Everything ever since has been just, well it’s been there. Todd is more interested in spectacle and exploration than writing. And unfortunately that’s been incredibly successful for him
Not soon enough 😭 Probably won’t be what we want from it anyways, they’ll take all the worst parts of Andromeda and leave the good on the cutting room floor, somehow.
I’m having fun zooming around the galaxy as a tough bounty hunter/vanguard. Has all the good bits of Fallout (exploring abandoned buildings, weapon variety, base building etc). I swear people are not even playing the same game with how they describe it.
Yeah, you’re right, they need a “fast travel to tracked quest next location” button so I don’t have to futz with the menus. But at least I’m not arbitrarily waiting several minutes to get to fun whenever I have to go somewhere.
You can fast travel to tracked quest location, I think as long as it’s not a new location. On Xbox you open the main menu/wheel thing, hover over the quests option at the bottom and just press x.
Are user reviews on places like Metacritic or Steam ever relevant? Review bombing happens consistently any time anyone is slightly miffed at something, which in gaming is literally all the time.
I'm not exposed to that many "gamer takes" lately, luckily. I watched a recent dunkey video on Starfield reviews, that had some thumb-headed idiot screaming in falsetto about the pronoun switch (oh, the horror, for such a thing to exist! oh, the humanity!). Other than that I haven't seen that much complaining about that specific thing. While it could still be about that, I also think it could easily be getting underwhelming scores because it's... a bit underwhelming. (So far, anyway, I haven't played a lot yet)
I hate Steam’s review system, though. Binary yes or no is not useful to me. I want to know if a game is good (maybe a play eventually) vs absolutely amazing (where I might prioritize playing it right away). Such granularity is also useful because a 10/10 might be worth it even if it’s not my favourite type of game, but a 7/10 can be very worthwhile if it is the type of game I adore.
It’s a shame that user reviews on sites like Metacritic are just consistent trash. Too many users only know 0 or 10 and the user reviews are often review bombed. I wish regular users could at least give numbers like critics. No professional critic is gonna give a game a 0 because of a handful of problems, for example, but average people will totally give a game a zero for that. Only problem with critics is that they often have a perspective that makes them detached from the average person, since they spend all their time reviewing. Ideally user reviews would fill that gap, but users are incredibly fickle.
I think Steam’s Yes/No system is the best option we’ve got for user review scores. As you said yourself, for most people, it’s either 0 or a 10. And while granularity can help, it’s worthless when it differs on a user to user basis. One users 5 is another users 7. And is the difference between a 1 and a 2 even remotely the same between a 9 and a 10? Probably not.
The biggest argument I could see is that “Mixed” option where it’s neither option, but I feel like that doesn’t really help anyone overall and is just indecisive.
If you just ignore a score of 0, then why even have it and conversely, why not show the same treatment towards the equally as ridiculous score of a 10?
for the most part it seems to work better than on Metacritic or other review sites with 5-10 star ratings. a lot of people are very unreasonable with 0 star reviews where they’ll give it a 0 for a slight inconvenience even if the game is completely playable
might as well lump the 0-4 star people together on a 10 scale
This game is just ridiculous. Overhyped advertising, terrible optimalization, 10 years old graphics, so many loadscreens, plain story, no real space exploration, perk wall to do anything, horrible UI and they call it next gen open world space exploration RPG. I stopped playing after 10 hours so I can make a good assumption but it got only worse and worse. I don’t have time to waste it on this. Even if it starts being more enjoyable later it doesn’t excuse all the issues.
I feel you. The first 10-15 hours did feel like kind of a slog. I will say, I hit a point where I’m legitimately enjoying the game and things seem to have coalesced in a way they just don’t in earlier game. I’m 20 hours in though. That’s a slow starter if there ever was one.
You’re a patient man. If you enjoy it, that’s good. But that game is not for me. Last game I enjoyed from Bethesda was Oblivion so I’m not much surprised. I’m quite picky…
Starfield has fantastic art direction and ambience. The gunplay is really good, perhaps the best gunplay of any RPG, and a surprise coming from Bethesda. Story hits some good beats, and exploration is rewarding, though repetitive about 50% of the time in the typical Bethesda fashion (remember Draugr crypts?).
That being said, the game has some shortfalls, primarily in the roleplay aspect. The ship building and crew management is good, but it doesn’t feel great, and is sometimes just frustrating, so you never feel truly immersed in your own ship. Lack of low earth orbital and terrestrial flight is immersion breaking (even if players might opt to skip it if it were present) along with the fact that the ship is relegated to being a flying mule and most transportation is basically instant teleportation via menus, which IMO hurts the isolation and exploration RP and challenge. Ship combat is straight up mediocre for a space game in 2023. Gun selection and modding is decent, but far from top tier. I would describe the apparel as a bit on the bland side, few of the clothes and armor pickups made me go: I want to put this on, I’ll look badass (Cyberpunk 2077 syndrome).
In fact I think starfield shares a lot with Cyberpunk 2077: massive budget, AAA art direction with gameplay spread across so many systems and features that a lot of them leave you wanting more.
There’s something I’d like to call “the Bethesda” bar. It’s basically an industrial bar lower than most. Let’s define what that means:
releasing the same game over and over
make games so buggy that a release with only a couple hundred of glitches is deemed "polished*
ignore progressive development for things like NPC AI
put all the money in marketing and hype
make the user think they’re getting something new, rather than just another boilerplate game
I’m sure the story writers did some characters justice, but I won’t be playing this game - especially since Bethesda claims it “can’t run on older hardware”, despite the fact that modders are proving them wrong.
The Betheada bar is a cancer upon the industry and I view it as consumer facing psy-ops, relying on brain-dead fanboys with nothing going on in their lives to squeal with glee as a new AAA-title is released to fill that void.
Ah yes the “everyone who likes something I don’t like is a brainless zombie” argument, coming from someone who doesn’t like Bethesda and hasn’t even played the game.
I can echo that sentiment. The MQL starts really slow and has a lot of exposition overlord as is normal for Bethesda games. Once I started doing side missions for the UC Vanguard and “pimped my ride” xzibit style I got hooked.
Exactly what I experience in every Bethesda game. Boring ass main quest line where a bunch of British people telling me about starsigns or some shit and then I joined the vanguard and never touched the main plot again because exploding pirates and space hobos while exploring planets is where it’s at.
youtu.be
Aktywne