the main quest isn’t where you have the best interactions.
No worries there, I’ve been focusing on faction quests and stuff like that for the most part, only occasionally dipping into the main quest for a few missions. One thing I feel like Bethesda did well with the writing of Starfield is that they finally made the main quest not world-saving urgent (at least not from the get-go). In practically every other bethesda game I can think of, the player starts off pretty much right from the start with a “Hurry! We need to do [Quest] before [Bad Thing] happens!”, which inevitably kills the immersion a bit when you go fuck around for a solid month just exploring and doing side-quests. But in Starfield it makes perfect sense that you’re not necessarily out there every single day chasing down artifacts, at the beginning of the game, they’re just a curiosity
I’m sure there are others, but it’s really not as uncommon as you’re making it sound, especially for AAA titles. I’d also argue it’s disingenuous to say that No Man’s Sky has “very little else going for it”. It was shit at launch, but they’ve built a really solid game now.
Again (and I feel like I need to keep re-iterating this, because people on this site are so sensitive about any criticism to their favorite games) Starfield is fun. That just doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have been better, and there’s nothing wrong with pointing out the areas we feel it fell short. Really, I think what Yahtzee Croshaw said about Tears of the Kingdom applies here - “If the game had these things, you wouldn’t be saying they didn’t matter”
That would probably help, but I find stealth builds to be really dull in Bethesda games. I do agree though that the mobility is great, I just wish there was zero-g combat (if there is, and I haven’t gotten there yet, no spoilers plz)
And yeah star citizen has the best flight model and ship combat mechanics imo - it’s a shame about the rest of the game… And to be fair there, there’s only so much you can do that with a flight model when it’s primarily going to be played on KBM or a game pad, but some games manage to do pretty damn well (Everspace comes to mind as a game with really excellent gamepad controls for spaceflight)
to be fair regarding what was promised, the vast majority of gamers arent out here reading every interview about the game ahead of time, so you can’t blame them for seeing a game that takes place in space, with stuff like ship building being one of its big selling points, and then blame them for expecting it to have features on par with the other big name space games from the last decade. Just because it’s not promised, doesn’t mean it’s not missed 🤷🏼♂️ like I said though, it’s really not a deal breaker, it just would have been a big selling point for me personally.
I definetely fall under that umbrella, I’ve got mods downloaded, but didn’t bother with the achievement mod. I downloaded my mods after the first mission though.
I’m enjoying starfield for sure, but I think it does have a fair few faults, though I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of them are subjective. For instance I can’t stand bullet sponge enemies and the bullet sponge is strong with starfield. Drives me crazy when I can literally empty an entire magazine of an auto shotgun pointblank into an enemies face, and have it only take them down to like 40% health lol. I grabbed a mod that helps with it, but its still pretty bad, even with that mod, and it breaks the balance a bit. Hoping that once proper mod support is in we get something better.
I also think the whole “spaceship” part of the game is pretty half-baked, I wasn’t expecting E:D levels of piloting immersion, but I’d have hoped for more than basically a series of menus and loading screens for interstellar travel. Additionally ship combat balancing is pretty rough, all the encounters I’ve done so far have felt comically easy, or ridiculously hard (The final mission of a certain UC Vanguard mission comes to mind…)
Overall though I’m definetely having a lot of fun though, and while there are bugs, it’s definetely one the least buggy Bethesda titles we’ve seen so far, and definetely less buggy (in my experience) than BG3
I live in CA, literally entrenched in the history of “the old west” and I can honestly say not a single person I know has any cowboy memorabilia in their homes lol.
My dad had a little cast iron statue of a cowboy wrangling a bull on his desk at work growing up (a gift from a client) , but that is literally the only instance I can think of lol
And I also don’t know a single person who regularly watches cowboy movies, I can’t even remember the last time a cowboy movie was made in the US… I think that remake with Chris Pratt?
Yeah, for a Bethesda game, 25% of people using mods right out of the gate is frankly totally believable.
And while starfield isn’t perfect, people not finishing the first mission would hardly be an indictment against the game itself, who judges if a game is worth playing in the first mission? Usually - and especially in games like this - the first mission has practically nothing to do with the standard gameplay
I mean, not necessarily - they might be buying it on the switch because they want a “mobile” version and don’t own a steam deck.
But yeah, ultimately if you own a switch, you should know what to expect by now from anything that isn’t a first party Nintendo title (and even then it can be a bit hit or miss from a performance standpoint)
My wife and I have almost finished our playthrough in split screen, and I’ve done a act or so solo, so let me share my experience
The performance can get a bit spotty - I’ve got a really nice rig, and admittedly I’m playing on max setting and 4k resolution, but we do have frame spikes in split screen that you don’t see in solo
The way inventory is managed is kind of a pain, each player has their own inventory, comprised of their characters stuff, as well as whatever NPCs happen to be associated with that player, so it’s not as straightforward to manage as in Solo. Also if my wife has something in her camp chest, she has to get it herself, I can’t get it for her.
The way dialogue is handled is a mess (though I’d argue this is partly a problem for solo mode too). If both players are in separate dialogues at the same time, then only half the audio actually gets played, and which half gets played is super inconsistent, to where neither player is really having a smooth experience. Additionally, which player is in control of a dialogues is whoever triggered it, which wouldn’t be so bad except you often wind up triggering them on accident
Combat feels slightly slower/more boring, because you’re waiting for another person to make their turns, and that only gets worse if they’re playing a build that has lots of minions. I often find myself taking my phone out during combat because it gets boring waiting for them to do their turns.
Which characters belong to which controllers gets mixed up all the time, and we’re always having to fix it when we first hop on
Those gripes aside it is a lot of fun, you just have to learn to deal with the quirks. But it’s pretty clear while playing that it was designed as a single player game, with couch coop tacked on top of that primary goal
The issue isn’t screen real estate, but processing power
When you do split screen, you’re basically having to render two games at once (a bunch of stuff can be “shared” like physics and such, but you still have to render two PoVs at the very least). This is helped slightly in split screen by the fact that you’re rendering a much smaller PoV for each player, with multi-monitor split screen, you lose that edge.
Basically it could totally be done, but only on pretty decent hardware and/or a really efficient game
Yeah I think it’s less that people are setting unrealistic expectations for a Bethesda game, and more that people are getting fed up with being told they should be happy with all the faults “because it’s Bethesda”.
Bethesda gets a really weird pass in the gaming industry and when it comes to shallow content and bugs. I think a lot of that comes from the modability of their games, so that with mods and a few years of patches, the games often end up being a lot of fun - but the fact is that the games themselves, as released by Bethesda are usually hollow shells by comparison.
For instance it always irks me when people say Skyrim VR is the best VR game - you literally need a couple dozen mods just to make it function as an actual VR game (lack of 3d audio in a VR game is just unforgivable imo, let alone any actual physics interactions).
I think people are just starting to get fed up with Bethesda’s business model of building barebones games and counting on modders to make it fun. And then people get further fed up when they say so online and get told things like “but yeah it’s Bethesda, what did you expect?”
Concurrent players on launch is really only a metric of hype - from what I’ve seen so far in discussions, the game itself is shaping up to be a pretty big let down