The game seems good and mostly well made, with the best hand-crafted environments I’ve ever seen from Bethesda.
But when it comes to the core gameplay loop, I feel like I’ve played this game already and I got bored very, very quickly.
It truly plays like Fallout 4 but with more menus and loading screens in order to fast travel somewhere. There is space combat, but it doesn’t feel compelling to me. Click on bad ship until kaboom.
You want to fast travel? Drop some things, you can’t fast travel while encumbered. Please undock first, we have some quest events tied to undocking and we don’t want you to miss those. Please fast travel to the planet before landing at a location, we have some quest events tied to the space around planets and we don’t want you to miss those.
Again though, the game is generally well made and I can see a lot of people truly enjoying it and the many gameplay systems you can dive into like settlement, ship, crew building, and side questing.
The slower-paced looter shooter gameplay loop just really isn’t for me right now. I’d rather play Fallout or Borderlands.
Note that I haven’t commented on the story. I don’t feel like I’ve experienced enough of it to really give a good opinion on it. I’ve played 4 hours.
It isn’t really a slower paced looter shooter, hell I barely loot anything and talk my way out of most situations.
It is more of a story based RPG, where you carve your own story out of the game. You decide what kind of character you want to play, and which quests you follow and which you ditch, anything is permitted.
If the only thing you do is go inside a random dungeon, shoot anything that moves, loot anything that isn’t nailed down and then go sell it, you won’t have a great time.
If you want to enjoy the game more, I’d suggest to choose a trope for your character: diplomatic Federation Captain, cunning Bounty Hunter, vicious Space Pirate, hardened Space Trucker, curious Scientific Explorer, …
Then find a quest line that synergies with your trope and follow it all the way through. Making decisions based upon how your character would react, not just what option will give you the most loot or is the easiest to accomplish.
Starfield has all the scifi tropes imaginable, kind of like what Skyrim had with Fantasy.
Currently I am enjoying my interpretation of the backstory of Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek. Being as helpful as I can, making philosophical statements and trying to find a diplomatic solution to anything. I change the UC to be the Federation and the Vanguard to be Starfleet. And recreated the USS Enterprise to the best of my abilities.
The funny thing is that “Publisher Bethesda was not permitted to pay additional royalties for the RPG because it scored 84 on Metacritic, according to Fallout New Vegas developer Chris Avellone. It appears that Obsidian’s publishing contract included a deal that meant the studio would be issued bonuses if the game hit a Metacritic of 85.” scores matter to Bethesda a lot even enough to ruin relationships and screw developers.
Oh nooooooo, a random nobody on the internet doesnt like how I write in my second language, whatever shall I do? Is that good enough for you sire? May I get your highly esteemed stamp of approval now?
How can reviews be monetized also the overall score is what really matters and is far more trustworthy than any games reviewer. Oh you mean points, I still fail to see how that matters when a game has 10k+ reviews and some tiny portion of them are memes. There is literally nothing better in terms of reviews.
Steam reviews are generally 90% memes or circle jerking.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint had mostly negative. The reviews all complain about either no achievements or the fact that the game was locked to their Ubisoft launcher first. Not real criticism of the game, especially considering most of what people complained about on release was fixed by the time it got put onto Steam.
It’s now 7 months later and it’s finally gone up to mixed with mostly positive reviews recently, despite no changes to the game.
Compare Breakpoint to Wildlands, it’s not as good previous game, all of the recent reviews are still circle jerking but posting positively.
You do realize you are cherry picking right? The power of steam reviews it that it’s just users posting what they want and there is a score aggregate with cool tools that tell you if a game is being review bombed. There are plenty of very good reviews on steam and I use them all the time when going through my many thousands of wish listed indie games. Please don’t tell you me you think reviews done by “game journalists” getting early review copies and going to review events is better… on the whole. At least with steam reviews I know it’s people like me rating a game.
This is great. Amidst all the comparisons and issues with Starfield, I am learning about so many other good space exploration games in these discussions haha
Aww man it’s actually a bummer to hear so many people are disliking the game. This has been the first game in a while where I’ve gotten hooked. I love the RPG elements in the game and the story has been brilliant. I’ve enjoyed games recently like Ragnarok and Control but this is the first one where I’m excited to just get back and sucked into the world. The last Bethesda game I played was actually Fallout 3 over a decade ago. It makes sense as Mass Effect is my favorite franchise and this feels like an evolution of that. My perfect game would probably be Starfield with ME: Andromeda combat.
I totally agree. I’m having a blast with this game. Imo, the best thing Beth has ever made (yeah, suck it Morrowind stans)
I think the problem is that this game has a bit of a slow burn. It took a bit for it to open up and make sense for me, more than most Beth games. I think over time the hate cycle will die down and people will get it on a steam sale and finally sink their teeth into it and after a couple of years it’s going to be as beloved as Skyrim is today.
I think a big part of the problem is just hype cycles. People had expectations that were through the roof. They didn't tell you they had seamless transitions to space, and they didn't tell you they had BG3 caliber branching conversation trees (which we're a long way from being able to realistically do outside of a CRPG). But people seemingly expected that.
I watched the direct and we got basically what I expected (though the gunplay feels better than I expected. I definitely felt like VATS was needed in FO4.) It's Bethesda's game design philosophy of a massive world with a bunch of different play styles and a bunch of different quest lines (and smaller single quests) and locations that don't have to be done in any order. You can easily get sidetracked and go down rabbit holes. They iterated on most of their core features and adapted them to the new setting in a really well done way.
I also love the way the skill system brought back the "get better by doing" philosophy of Skyrim with challenges to unlock higher levels, and the story telling is sci fi in more than just skin.
Out of curiosity, have you played BG3 ? It seems that most people who don’t like the game are coming to starfield right from BG3 and those who do have not played it. BG3 is now just the bar that AAA story telling is held to and anyone who has experienced it is having a hard time with the story of other games.
I’m playing Baldurs Gate 3 with friends and Starfield singleplayer. And I am enjoying both.
They aren’t the same game, even though they both rely on story and some aspects of the game are the same (like coming up with your own character and wanting to see how the story affects them)
I’ve only seen one truly uncomfortable close up and it was when a dialogue initiated right in a doorway so the camera got pushed right up the dude’s nose and I could see the empty space in his head lol
I prefer to play 1st person and I’ve always been quite okay with the camera angle for talking to someone, personally. It’s kinda how I would see people I’m talking to face to face IRL, except I don’t have to look down. I only dislike when multiple characters are involved and it does that jump cut to zoom in on a dude across the room. That’s not natural at all.
I loved the game and put 1000hrs in it but I wouldn't recommended it anymore. Its simply past its golden age. Frontier seem to have given up on it. Its pretty much in maintenance mode after they half assed the space leg DLC and mostly ended community goals. They didn't even include walking around in your own ship.
Its now the vibe of a MMO on its last legs. I would love to see it spark back to life, but the devs would have to pull out the big guns.
The worst thing for elite was being made by frontier as they are now. Frontier now is just a tycoon simulator game generator, that’s all they care about. It’s like the FIFA of the tycoon games… spit out another one every year or two and who gives a rats ass about the stuff we already made or haven’t completed.
I loved what elite wanted to be, I hate what the bean counters did to it…
People shit on star citizen for their dev cycle, but elite took the worse route in my opinion: they released a minimally viable product and then intended on building it into something bigger, but got cheap/lazy and just accepted that what they have out is “good enough” so they dumped all the internal ship plans (braben spoke about boarding ships and piracy on foot in a ship, that kind of thing.) They dumped so much of the simulation stuff and just stuck with the BGS… it’s frustrating to see what could have been.
Elite’s biggest issue is that it never really knew what kind of kame it wanted to be. An MMO? There aren’t enough multiplayer features for that. A (mostly) single-player space experience? It’s too shallow with no story, so it won’t satisfy the RPG fans. A space “simulator” where you just have fun flying ships? It’s probably closest to that, except you can’t fly any ship you want, and in fact it takes dozens of hours of grind to be able to switch things out so they’re fresh and you have more fun with the game again. And the simulation is very simplistic and not all that fun either, so it’s not for hardcore simulation fans either.
And because of this approach it has a bad combination of features that not only won’t fully satisfy either of the potential target groups; they also often work against each other. For example the multiplayer component is a dealbraker for me: I want a truly SP game where I can dictate how I play it - where I can mod it, or at least use cheats to find my own pacing, fly different ships on a whim, whatever. But the game simply won’t allow that.
But it’s also not a fully-fledged MMO where you could build (or at least own) systems/planets/bases whatever with your clan and compete against others for … idk, something.
And, again, it’s just not a story game that you could play from start to finish for the storytelling and worlbuilding.
Really sad, because the potential is there to have any (or perhaps even at least two) of those types of games.
The more I’m playing starfield, the more I’m considering it. Starfield is doing a really good job of reinvigorating my excitement for the other games that have done literally everything better in the past lol
I would be impressed if they did it in Gamebryo/Creation Engine and solve the “everything is a cell” problem. I mean, No man’s Sky and Elite Dangerous exist and have shown seem less space travel. One guy with DarkBasic did it in the Evochron games for decades.
This comes off as a hey look look at me I can do it in a cave with a box of scraps but BUGTHESDA can’t in 7 years?!
I think the problem is also that Bethesda doesn’t really “do” vehicles, probably due to engine limitations.
Usually, it’s just horses or “passenger” travel (like when you man the guns in FO4 birds). I guess one could maybe consider power armor in FO4 to be kind of like a “vehicle”, but it works more or less the same as just walking around.
Oh, there is dragon riding in Skyrim, but it’s a mess and you don’t have that much control.
I’m surprised the engine can even handle space combat, honestly. And 360° movement as well, which would have been great for dragon riding in Skyrim. But most of the dragons in TES are dead, so we probably won’t get proper dragon riding in whatever TES: VI is.
(Sidenote about dragon riding/combat: Before Larian delved further into CRPGs, they made a regular third person RPG where you could play as a dragon. It was actually pretty fun. Still didn’t have full control, and it was only in certain sections, but it was entertaining. Divinity II: Director’s Cut, in case anyone’s interested. Don’t know how well it’s aged, but I enjoyed it a few years ago.)
There have been a couple of mods for Fallout 4 and New Vegas to add vehicles. IIRC the only one that wasn’t just an object floating across the ground was in that big expansion mod made by sex perverts, I forget what it’s called. New something?
Yeah, but the SEO rewards anything with the word “Starfield” in it at the moment and there’s enough people seemingly invested in putting down the game at every opportunity that they’ll share this around and drive clicks.
My google news feed is like all Starfield now - getting ridiculous and i’m expecting by tomorrow will be like “Should you make french toast and eat it while playing Starfield?”
It is essentially just a tech demo BUT, I would say they’ve touched on what I wanted from the space travel.
You can take off, fly the ship, point it up, and then boost off into space. That’s fun, that’s what I wanted, and I don’t think it’s really expecting that much.
“It’S NoT ReAlIsTiC”, none of it’s realistic, it’s a video game ffs.
It’s a fun and engaging mechanic that I’d expect in a great space game.
Bethesda’s seeming disdain for anything that could be considered a fun and seamless mechanic is frustrating. And fanboys seemingly have no expectation that Bethesda games should actually get better and improve on their weak areas.
I think Bethesda “fanboys” (like myself) just really like the core experience (warts and all) I play NMS when I want to lose myself in a beautiful seamless scifi setting and i play starfield when my focus is on engaging with faction and character storylines and some campy space encounters. I kinda like how janky bethesda games can be, reminds me of playing tabletop RPGs and all the weird janky shit that happens in those games too. I like that I can be the golden boy of the crimson fleet and still join up with the freestar rangers. I make up a little story for my character and act it out and have a lot of fun doing so.
The only thing I could do without is the loading screens. I don’t mind that landing on a planet isn’t seamless, but i mean… loading screen to get on ship, loading screen to get into space, loading screen to fly to different planet, wait until scan finishes, loading screen to land on planet.
That’s the worse part for me. If it was just a short cut scene for landing on a planet, I think that’d be 100% fine.
I just don’t think it’s good to let a company get away with not improving.
The small improvements they have made in Starfield are alright, but it feels like the bar was set with Skyrim and they can’t even really match something from 12 years ago.
I do not have high hopes for TES VI and I’m half expecting something extremely dated, as based off FO4 and Starfield I think the studio’s best days are behind them at this point.
The small improvements they have made in Starfield are alright, but it feels like the bar was set with Skyrim and they can’t even really match something from 12 years ago.
Or maybe game development is just hard? Why haven't other "better" developers created a game that improves upon Skyrim?
Look at Baldur's Gate 3. It's "small improvements" to the type of game that Larian has been working on for many years at this point.
I'm not really talking about preferences. I'm asking more about the niche that games like Skyrim/Fallout/Starfield fill. If it is so simple to just make "Skyrim but better" or "Starfield but better" then where are all the games from other developers that are just that?
Or from another angle. Where is the Path of Exile for Skyrim?
Yup. People will always bring up some games like Witcher 3 as “better than Skyrim” and in terms of the roleplay elements within the story? Sure. Do the games have some similarities? Sure. They’re both open world RPGs in a medieval fantasy setting. But beyond that, the comparisons fall apart. Somebody just looking for any RPG experience might well prefer Witcher 3 over Skyrim, but somebody looking for another Skyrim experience is not gonna find it in Witcher 3. Same goes for comparisons for NMS and Starfield. Does NMS have seamless planetary flight and Starfield doesn’t? Absolutely. Can you scan plants and wildlife in both? Sure. But, again, beyond that the comparisons fall apart.
I don’t even like skyrim BG3 is objectively a much better game, least Bethesda can do is esspecially with the funding they got from Microsoft is not sell skyrim again but with a space reskin this time
Starfield seems like a pretty stark improvement over Fallout 4’s shortcomings, so I don’t think it is fair to say that they aren’t improving. Just looking at my own playtime, I bailed out of Fallout 4 at the 20 hour mark, but I’m 60 hours into Starfield and haven’t slowed down at all.
Bethesda’s seeming disdain for anything that could be considered a fun and seamless mechanic is frustrating.
Or that the technology available doesn't really make this type of setup reasonable?
Star Citizen is trying to do this and it's been how long with how much money spent?
Would Starfield be a better game if they sacrificed the quests/content/companions and just made a game that was more like Elite Dangerous or No Man's Sky?
That’s fun, that’s what I wanted, and I don’t think it’s really expecting that much.
I mean, CIG has been trying to make a game that does what you want for the last 13 years and they aren't close yet. Maybe it's not as easy as you want it to be?
Star citizen has been able to do "all that" for at least 4 years, and most consider it a glorified tech demo
In Star citizen you can also do all those things with other players too
If you think "they aren't close yet" it might be worth trying it out during one of the free fly events - the only cost is your time to download and play it.
Having an opinion is fine, having an informed opinion is better
If it's just a glorified tech demo, then it doesn't seem like it's able to be compared to a released and completed game? Unless the designation of tech demo means something I'm not aware of.
The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
I only know of it from memes about it's development, but I would agree from what I know. Scope creep seems to be a thing there. Ambitions are great, until they get in the way of every other aspect of the game lol
If things continue the way it has been, never would be the best estimate of a release date.
Depending on the last time you logged into a session, the current status is between playable and entertaining and nightmare of lag/desync issues making it something most people would want to avoid
In a purely technical sense, if CIG locked the code branch and set 100% of the creative teams to the task, the current system could replicate a Starfield level game and do so in a seamless manner.
It wouldn't be without issues but something I consider plausible
I just don’t see atmospheric entry/exit as being that important to my immersion, yes it was kind of cool the first time you did it in NMS, seven years ago, but it got old fairly quickly even in that game. I’m happy for Starfield to have a more ME like set up and focus on other areas of the game.
Same. It’s cool for maybe 5 times before you just stop caring. Only thing I miss is actually flying around the planet, and that’s purely for finding the best basebuilding spot.
Yeah, was so ambitious, but progress is so painfully slow. If they delivered on what they have said though, the game will be incredible, but I highly doubt that is ever going to happen, I gave up hope almost a decade ago.
Elite Dangerous too. I was really disappointed when I lauched Starfield and learned there wasn't any seamless landing for exploring planets. It was a huge bummer to me.
Elite Dangerous is by far the most fun I've ever had landing and taking off in a space ship. No other game comes even close. It genuinely never got old. The entire docking process was so damn fun with a HOTAS.
Oh wow, I haven’t played since before you could land on planets. My issue with Elite was always feeling like there was exactly nothing to do at all beside mine and be bad at dog fights lol.
I mean, that’s still pretty much the case, it’s just emulated very well, with lots of polish. It’s a lot like Minecraft in that you have to make your own fun, but once you find it it’s a very nice flow. It’s definitely better with friends, and fights with real players especially are fun, and make you realize just how bad you are.
What's fun about getting ganked by overengineered griefers hunting newbies at the first engineering station that the game points you to? I jumped to solo after that. Fuck that.
Likewise, I haven't played any of the expansions. I didn't say it was a perfect game, just that landing and taking off has not been better in any other game. I loved the space stations.
You mean you can now land on planets in Elite Dangerous? A game I own and haven’t played in years? This is the second game I’ve been shown I need to go back to by these conversations. ‘Satisfactory’ popped up yesterday. At this rate I’ll never play Starfield.
You can land on moons in elite dangerous and if you have the expansion you can land on planets and moons with a light atmosphere and walk on foot.
If anyone complained about barren moons everywhere in starfield, just be warned elite has exactly zero interesting planets/moons in the literal billions of star systems it has. Everything is identical minus terrain colors and planetary rings. I loved elite for a while, but as far as exploration goes you really need to like scanning for the sake of scanning.
Starfield has a lot of stuff to explore, even if some of it is repetitive, but elite has maybe 10-15 interesting locations in the entire galaxy…
I’ve been thinking about picking it up. Do you need one or two HOTAS? I already have a pretty expensive racing sim so I’m not trying to go down that rabbit hole (again)
There are plenty of moons/planets with life and interesting things to see, but yes there are a lot of “barren” moons and whatnot. The game tells you what to expect when you click on a given object. It will tell you if there are flora and fauna, what the temperature is, what minerals to expect, that kind of thing. From what I can tell there is almost always some sort of structures/bases on the planets as well.
There’s both too much and too little stuff on planets. The random outposts it spawns are kind of boring but it’s annoying when I want to put down an outpost and the game has randomly put someone else on the best spot. But when I want to get to them, there’s a long walk for pretty much nothing.
Nope, not true in the slightest. There’s actually a lot of variety in biomes, flora, fauna, characteristics - and a lot of them even have multiple biomes with different life per biome.
What i expect people are complaining about is one of two things:
Planet scanning is boring.
On noes generated dungeons
To the first point, I agree planet scanning gets pretty boring if that’s all you do for 5 hours straight. But there’s a TON of content in this game. Switch it up. Once you’re done with a mission, go explore the planet you ended up on and scan the things. Or don’t. Who cares. Planet scanning isn’t necessary at all. I think a lot of people see that planet scanning gives you a ton of credits and xp, go grind that one thing, and then complain that it’s boring.
On the second point, yes every planet will have a bunch of locations that are like “Cave” or “Covered Crater” or “Abandoned Facility” and such. A lot of them are small resource troves, but the facilities actually feel pretty handbuilt - if you check them out. But I think a lot of people see “Abandoned [whatever]” and think “oh autogenerated content, meh” without checking it out. I certainly have been guilty of that. But every time I actually decide to go in, I’m surprised at how much fun I actually have in those environments, how much environmental storytelling is actually there, and how well built the levels are. I feel like they hand built a bunch of these or components of them and an engine puts it all together.
The reality is that every Beth game ever has used procedural generation. And they’ve been getting better at it with each game. Skyrim felt less empty that Oblivion. Starfield feels less empty, overall anyway, than Skyrim. The handbuilt hub planets are way busier than any location in Skyrim. The procedural worlds feel more empty than skyrim for sure, but it makes plenty of sense, theres still plenty to do, and the amount of planets makes it feel less empty. And overall, there’s a LOT more handbuilt and story content than skyrim - by several factors imo.
I’ll also point out that the procedural content is just flavor. You don’t need to engage in it but it’s there if you want it. This game has a TON of handbuilt content - more than any other Beth game. The faction quests feel like a full game in their own right. The side quests are plentiful and quite deep. Complaining about procedural content in this game feels like complaining about the number of leaves on a tree.
You can complain a lot about Starfield, but it has some of the most aggressive fast travelling options available to date. If you are walking a lot, it means you don’t understand the mechanics.
You can literally look at a waypoint and teleport to it.
I went from inside a dungeon, and teleported all the way to the commercial district on a different planet in a different system to sell everything in like 10 seconds.
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