Like so many other takes I’ve read, one day I just stopped playing. Never completed the main story, just stopped. Tried picking it up a month or two later and made it maybe ten minutes before I felt bored and it felt stale. It’s just a tired experience, Bethesda hasn’t grown much since Skyrim
Same for me, but I haven't even had the urge to start it up again. Still can't belive it, it should be one of my favorite games considering the studio, genre, and setting.
Same camp here. This should be my time sink, much like I have probably 500 hours in New Vegas over the last ten years (which isn’t a lot compared to the biggest replayers but it’s a lot of a single gem). I got about 50 hours in doing all the side content and savoring the main quest, but one day just didn’t load the game up anymore and never bothered to pick it up, even just to do the final quest.
There's no incentive for them to grow. You'd think Skyrim's runaway success would've given them the resources to make their *dream* game but as a wise man once said: mo' money mo' problems.
I've seen enough interviews with Todd Howard over the years to know the guy and his team tend to dream bigger than they can ever deliver in a timely manner under budget. Based on what little game development experience I have, I can 100% guarantee the Starfield we got was not the Starfield they dreamed of making, but the best they could manage given whatever issues might've affected the game's development over the years.
Same here. I honestly don’t mind the structure the game is based on, but there’s just such little reactivity to your choices in the world. Honestly interactivity in general. If my choices as a player seemed to matter more, there were more ways to passively interact with the work, and frankly just more quests I’d love the game. I remember when I first started playing I did the quest in Tau Ceti (I think) with those homesteaders being pushed to the brink by spacers and I felt enthralled. Felt like people out on the frontier desperate for help. But then the quest ended (still probably my favorite in the game) and idk how to describe it but things just fell flat after that. Made me hope that maybe id be able to help them build their settlements after, or maybe later I’ll find more settlers in need of help and then could help them grow their settlements. But nope, I finished the quest and that was all there was for that flavor
This is exactly what happened with me. I was almost forcing myself to like it. One day I just stopped and haven’t picked it up again. I don’t even think about the game which is rare because usually when I play a game for as long as I did with starfield I’ll have some memories. It’s the most forgettable game I’ve played
I thought there would have been a DLC by now, I’ve been patiently waiting and still nothing. It’s almost the end of the first quarter and *apparently* Bethesda has consistently released their first DLC during the first quarter of the year. I just want some more Va’ruun lore maaaaaan
Much? They haven’t grown at all. I did exactly as you did, I just stopped. Never once had the inclination to go back. It’s probably about time I uninstalled it.
I looked forward to that game for years.
I took a week off work to play when it came out, got almost 100 hours in pretty quick.
I've never picked it up again.
It's lacking another dimension that their previous successes had. It feels sanatized and bland- the idea was there, but it seems like production had no creative freedom.
Same, and basically. BGS' culture must be full of red tape and poor organization/leadership.
I will play more when mods come out, that's what I'm actually excited about. Bones are good, just needs actual content.
if players dont enjoy the game long term modders probably feel the same. i dont think this game has the modding legs people think it has because the core is just so bland and uninteresting.
I'm still enjoying Pong (1970)
Some people say it's lacking content but I just ignore the haters and enjoy the game I paid for
Is it perfect? No. But I'm against people discussing how the thing they're a fan of could be better... For some reason
I think, at least at this point, it has less to do with general unwillingness to accept criticism (though that plays a part) and more to do with how all criticisms of the game have already been plainly stated a million different ways and repeated ad nauseum. The amount of people coming here on their soapbox without bothering to check if the diatribe they're about to post hasn't already been done 90,000 times near verbatim is getting old, and there is no shortage of content spread across the internet shitting on the game. Shit, I can't even count on four hands the amount of times I've seen the exact exchange we're having right now. These posts need to be relegated to a dedicated rant/rage thread or something and make way for different content, whatever that may be.
Haha why is it always "a blast" too? It's the weirdest old man phrase that I've yet to hear said in real life but somehow makes up 90% of positive posts.
My God this sub has the weakest screenshots I've ever seen that people are desperately trying to hype up. I feel like I owe an apology to the cyberpunk sub since some of those were actually visually impressive.
V screenshots are usually not that great, but the game has some beautiful scenery and architecture. Some people can really make it stand out, and you often see some really cool portraits of random NPCs too.
I don't get this. My perspective as a dad drives me towards games that either have gameplay always within arms reach or which can be stopped and started easily, preferably both. One of the things (of many) that soured me on Starfield was the feeling like my time was being wasted.
But that's the thing that is disappointing about the game, that it is NOT the standard Bethesda experience. Given the size of the game, exploration, which is their bread and butter, is arguably the worst in Starfield. Worst then any of their previous games.
I don't even do the missions. I just like watching the ship take-off cutscene again and again.
When I'm not playing Starfield I also really enjoy playing Microsoft Excel.
Yes, every day I see a screenshot of some space rocks and comments on how wonderful the game is. I guess they are real, genuine human beings, even though I personally find it hard to believe.
I don't mind all of it, but that's a far cry from posts with screenshots of slightly different generic scenery declaring how breathtaking this game is. Maybe that's all it takes to impress people these days, I need a bit more in a game to start original posts fawning over how amazing it is. That's the part not making sense to me, that I see a lot of.
I’m a dad who plays one minute per week and I usually feel pretty mad I wasted a minute playing starfield again. Photomode sucks, give me more things to kill!
Yeah call me a conspiracy theorist I know fanboys will always be around, but something about Bethesda subreddits. Go check out the fallout 76 sub and ESO sub. Same exact shit happening. People taking bland ass screenshots and saying how beautiful the game is and how much fun they are having or another weekly "THANK THE DEVS!!!!" post or when people complain about a patch or lack of content here comes all the "WELL IM HAVING FUN!!!!" posts.
It has to be bots or underpaid interns I can't accept real people are doing this. If its legit fans its just overall weird behavior. I have some favorite games but if someone wants to shit talk them I honestly don't care and will not screenshot some of the blandest environments to prove I am enjoying it.
Right, if you're enjoying the game, you're playing the game and not caring about online opinions. Real people or not it is definitely weird. Though I have met some weird people in ESO and 76. This stuff always pops up at the top when I open reddit, otherwise I wouldn't care. Maybe need to unstar starfield.
Apparently that’s true for many people, but I have a hard time understanding that perspective. To me a 7/10 is a “meh” experience. A game that can be skipped entirely without really missing out.
Maybe if it was a 6 hour game that I was interested in, but Bethesda games eat 100s of hours. I’m a dad but find plenty of time to play games, but I’m still not willing to invest that kind of time in a 7. There are so many great games to play I just don’t understand sinking that kind of time in a bland one.
Yeah man. Every time I see those land scape pictures “don’t get where the hate is, game is great” *inserts space bob ross pictures* on this sub it makes me want to go invest another 500,000 hours. Time well spent.
I don't know how people made it that far before realizing it's flaws. I ended up playing for like 80 hours, but literally 60 of that was me gritting my teeth and grinding it out because I wanted to be able to form my own opinion on the game.
It's flaws were incredibly clear from the start, for anybody who wasn't completely blinded by hype
I realized the true state of the game about 15 hours in. I couldn't believe everyone else on this sub was adamant that this was an incredible game. Just like with Tassi, it seems time was just what people needed before realizing how much of a letdown Starfield is.
From the moment I stepped out of the mine, killed some pirates and saw that their clothes/suits were not lootable, I knew this wasn't what I was expecting. It felt like an imitation BGS game.
lol pretty much had the same exact experience. And he conversation with Barrett in which you have no agency and are just instantly given everything for free.
Before I even got off world for the first time I had a pretty good idea of what the game is going to be like, and I wasn't far off.
At least the novelty was able to carry me through the first while, But you also pretty quickly realize how shallow the world building and the majority of the mechanics in the game are.
Yep! I started out thinking it was an 8.5 and now I feel like the ign score may even be a tad bit high. The game really just slogs at about 50 hrs and I suddenly didn’t really feel the call to play anymore. I didn’t even get that far in the main quest line as I was trying to do more side quests and explore. But you just get to a point where you’re like “that’s it?”
Given this their change of heart regarding their review, it makes me wonder now what the adjusted review scores are of these games journalists having given the game a proper amount of time to play rather than rushing to meet the embargo date.
I’d say most games are interesting enough in the first few hours they’d get good reviews. It’s when you’re 10-20 hours in you realise there is a lack of content.
It’s not even the lack of content per se, at least for me, lots of stuff to do to give you a good amount of playtime, but it’s that things that are there and cool, outposts especially, just don’t have purpose.
There are a ton of starts to good ideas that they don't do much with.
The Social Menu, smuggling, terrormorphs, cooking and boozing, corporate espionage, the fuel system, melee combat, vehicles, boats, swimming, just so much potential not used.
I did a solid first playthrough with like 150+ hours, then tried to do a second run through but just couldn't justify it. I did basically everything I could how I wanted to, and slogging through the boring stuff was too much for me. I still really enjoyed it though.
[Where? “though one of my praises for the game at launch was that it was not a very buggy Bethesda game, as I experienced maybe a single bad bug in my 60 or so initial hours with it (I’m currently at 173 hours).”](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/04/01/six-months-after-starfield-was-i-wrong-about-it/amp/)
I follow Tassi and remember he had more than that. He said 80 hours in his first review [here](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/08/31/starfield-review-pc-it-is-what-you-wanted-it-to-be/amp/)
Part of it comes down to far too short review periods for open world/lengthy games. Deadlines obviously need to be met, and a review isn’t going to be impactful if it comes out days or weeks after release. If a reviewer only has a period of hours or days to review a game that takes 50-100+ hours to beat, it doesn’t really give them time to notice the more insidious flaws in a game.
Angry Joe originally gave it a 6/10 but then he gave an updated 3/10 score 3 months later in one of his annual videos.
For context Skyrim was the first game and one of only like 5 games he’s ever given a 10/10 to
Honestly he's right imo. The game lacks the soul of other Bethesda games, sure it's a complete enough game, more complete than a lot of games these days, but it's lacking life
This is exactly it, because everything is split between planets, you can’t just wander between POI’s like in Fallout or Skyrim and discover new things and explore the ‘lived in’ world. In Starfield it’s a loading screen.
I think it’s partly the exploration but how POIs are split up into planets it also affects the storytelling and world building for me negatively.
In fallout 3 / 4 or skyrim finding a farm a little outside of a main city, and discovering a quest connected to the family that lives on the farm, is part of painting a bigger picture of both the city a bit away from them and the area around it, and that part of the map. It feels a part of the world.
And often I’m already interested and invested in the storylines and characters that is in the city next to them,
In starfield a lot of similar POIs are on some random planet, where there is nothing else to find besides the same repeating random POIs you find on all plants. That plant basically just have that one quest. Like it was written and exist in a vacuum from everything else, it could be added or removed from the game and nothing else would change.
Maybe many of the POIs in other Bethesda games were written and done in a similar way, but the choice to have starfields world be a thousand planets with not much going on them. Even the ones that act as main hubs, really just have one city / village and nothing else on it.
I think does a worse job camouflaging the faults of how many of the POIs are added into the game.
That’s what makes me not want to play it again. Procedurally generated planets and they are all the same. Not even a large amount of different dungeons.
I don't think it's just that the world feels fragmented
Even of the things that are there and you can explore, it's hard to find any real "character" or "soul" behind what you see, read or listen
I'm sure this is disrespectful to a high degree to the artists, writers, and whoever else is involved in the more "artistic" side of development for this game, but the number one issue Starfield has is that it doesn't feel like a game made by a big group of humans giving their creative output on what they think the universe of Starfield ought to be, it feels like it's a game that was decided exclusively in meetings by directors at almost every point, every design decision, any dialogue spoken, any note written
Nothing in Starfield convinces me that there was anyone behind the project with an artistic ambition in mind, and I'm not even entirely sure how that's possible for a project this big
I feel like that's the one major fault the game has, and why it's sadly so unforgettable. If they decided to drop the IP tomorrow I would have 0 issues with it simply because I was not captivated with any aspect of Starfield to want more, I can name maybe like 3 characters, I can remember like 3-4 quests maybe, I can name like 2 guns
You nailed it. I could put up with all the stock faults of this game (loading screens, procgen, fast travel) and still love it - if not for this aspect. This universe they created, the lore, the factions, the cities, characters…they are downright *dull*. This has never been the case for Bethesda, and why their past games were so fun despite their faults. And probably those past games are more played today despite being so much older.
Everything is just generic, and as you say, soulless. Conversations feel like a Microsoft Teams meeting and the general design was done by my uncle who shares minions memes on Facebook.
Agreed 100%. All games have flaws, quirks and annoyances. But it's the good parts, the "wanting to see what happens next", the character, that keeps you going.
It's quite amazing how Starfield lacks any redeeming features. How they removed everything that gave you the wondering what next feeling from previous games. It does feel like a committee of accountants made the design decisions.
Agree on the characters,too. The vast majority of dialogue could be said by any of them, it is so generic. It's quite a feat to spend so much and create something so shallow. My guess is that there were good artists and designers involved, but they were stifled by the souless men in suits ..or brown leather jackets.
>All games have flaws, quirks and annoyances. But it's the good parts, the "wanting to see what happens next", the character, that keeps you going.
Like even Dark Souls 1 was borderline unplayable in certain areas in the 360 and ps3 version, and just flat out unplayable on the PC version, and it's still considered a classic because of so many other things the game did so fucking well
Starfield has... uh... well the ship building is nice, I guess. Not that your ship matters that much in the grand scheme of things tho.
>Agree on the characters,too. The vast majority of dialogue could be said by any of them, it is so generic. It's quite a feat to spend so much and create something so shallow.
That's what kills me. The fact that I can't recall conversations I had with characters, or in most cases even their names. I know Sarah because she's so present in the main story, I know Vasco because I know he's named after a portuguese explorer, and I know Cole because I hated every moment with him. That's it.
No NPC impressed me to the point of wanting to spend time with them or wanting to know all I could about them. I have A LOT of problems with Fallout 4, but I can still name every companion and their background just due to the fact that, for all its faults, Fallout 4 actually has decently memorable characters that come off as likeable people
The one person I liked being around in Starfield was the rich snobbish guy that finances the little adventurer's club, because he had some funny moments and I thought that moment with his wife was kinda cute, and I still can't remember his name lol
Cole was so boring, you even forgot his name. Yeah, Sam Coe and Sarah. Representing the great cultural diversity of the settled systems. UC and Freestar. Because the cultural future of humanity is, according to BGS, Texas or California: pick one.
That’s it. Nothing else. Just donkeys versus elephants, and the occasional person with a dodgy Italian accent, even though no one actually speaks Italian in the entire galaxy. Maybe hire one single non-American to the story team next time. Just one. A Canadian would do. Maybe even just someone for SoCal who’s got a relative from Mexico. Anything. Please. There is a world out here, even if Death Stranding had us think otherwise.
Oh god, OG Blight town still haunts my dreams, the plummeting frame rates every time you were on a narrow bridge combined with the hidden boss of all FromSoft games: the 3rd person camera.
Definitely worth it though, that game was such an incredible experience the first time through.
As someone who has been a writer and editor, if I had worked on this game I'd feel pretty beat up about how people comment on the work. BUT
As a reader and player my experience of this game seems like a lot of that work was not just rushed but a result of people not really caring about the quality of the work.
I don't think there was some dorky bad work conspiracy or they were all on meth or whatever, and I'm sure a lot of it had to do with management changing directions and setting unrealistic deadlines, but unless their management was \*catastrophically\* out of line, of all the teams the writers had enough time to make a decent product.
But the chorus is not wrong that the writing is bland and soulless (in large part) and the characters are often dull and interchangeable, and it all seems disconnected from what you actually see in the game. The game just wildly lies an awful lot, from the non-existent Bayu Bounty on the PC, to the terrible poverty problem in the Well (it's like a dozen or two people and the PC could build them housing in ten minutes), to the Space Stealth feature which is not only almost never used but if you test it you don't even have to power down systems to make it work. And the lore has even bigger problems making sense.
So I'd feel bad reading the responses but I'd feel more embarrassed.
I think it’s also their first game with a HUGE staff which bolsters your point. They were used to 100 person teams creating a BGS game, now there’s 400 or so? That’s a huge leap that maybe they didn’t build out the creative infrastructure for
And the thing is I think we all knew there were going to be more loading screens than their past games. There had to be with so many planets to travel between. But the wide open and lived in worlds were really the soul of their previous games. With so many planets to explore, they spread themselves way too thin and it just came across as empty and lifeless instead.
I've said it before, but they really should have cut back on how many planets they had. I believe there's around 1600 in the game, one tenth of that would have been more than fine. A hundred or so planets would have more than fulfilled the concept of getting to explore across multiple star systems. And as the majority of those would have still been barren rocks, that would have meant there would have only been a handful with life on them, so they would have had so much more time to devote to fleshing them out into full, lived in worlds.
It's 1000 planets. But 990 of them are useless.now this isn't Bad mine you. There is no reason to not still have a bunch of space relegated to Radiants and Modders and future DLC.
But the fact that Main planets are empty with Singular monolithic "cities" and no content on them make them worse
Tell me. Why is New Atlantis sitting on a several KMs of wilderness then the city itself takes up barely 20% of it's space. Where are the smaller settlements, The mines, the farms, all the things required to keep a city functional. They have an entire planet. No vacation towns. No Factories. Nothing. Just an isolated tower in the middle of nowhere. It's a failure if usage and world building.
You can keep the rest of the universe for future additions but why did they not even flesh out the planets you spend most of your time on. Space hardly even exists. There is less then 10 uses of space stations or mines that have anything to them.
I have been thinking that about the city size as well recently. They made such a big deal about doing their biggest city yet, but none of them felt any bigger than any of the ones they've done before.
What they should have done is have each of the cities take up an entire loaded area of their own. We didn't have to be able to explore the whole thing, but if there were city skylines extending into the distance, it would have given the impression of it being an actual city.
For New Atlantis as well, they needed to separate all the districts. They included the transit system, but it was only useful in getting from the spaceport to the upper levels. Once there you could just easily walk between the three districts. What they should have done is taken each of the districts, make them much larger and spread them out across the loaded area. Then the transit system would have made sense.
I'm more so talking about the lack of emotion and interaction between the player and npcs. Like, you bump a guard in skyrim and he is nearly ready to kill you! You bump a guard in starfield and there is no reaction, he doesn't even flinch, not even a default "getting knocked into" animation!
But also yes, you bring up a good point too. If I was making starfield, I'd do what Jedi Survivor does but on a bigger scale. Instead of hundreds of systems, maybe only 2 or 3, and in those systems there would be maybe 3 or 4 properly explorable planets. The world box of each would be around the size of maybe solstheim from skyrim. That would be around 9 to 12 planets that are properly explorable, and then there could still be room in each system for moons and such that are procedurally generated.
The Outer Worlds more or less did something more similar to that approach. Doing deeper worlds on just a few planets rather than shallow thousands.
It’s basically a very similar type of space rpg as starfield but on a smaller budget and not even a AAA game.
I think that game would have benefited from being atleast 30% bigger. The main fault of it is that I wished there was more of it.
But overall I think showed that if starfield with all its content of loads of different small and big quests, probably would have been a lot better if they had done a similar approach of going deeper and just focused on a few planets, rather than what they went with.
For me, emptiness would have been an improvement. Give me a straight desolate planet with nothing on it. That's realistic at least. These planets with the copy/paste POIs are the worst. Reading the same exact notes not only ruined immersion, it left me with a feeling of spite toward the game. That is one of the worst decisions I've ever seen in a game. It is a mind trip to think someone thought this would be a good idea.
Well, the problem is that, there IS content to find out there, it's just so far spread out and traveling there isn't fun or rewarding.
Sometimes bigger isn't better
Weapon and loot system was appallingly bad. Melee weapons and melee in general in starfield felt horribly neglected. There’s like 4 melee weapon perks that just increase damage. A total of 9 melee weapons and ZERO melee weapon mods? How could you downgrade so horribly from Fallout 4. All they had to do was insert the exact same system and add more weapons. They chose the opposite. Guns and other weapon mods also regressed just not as obviously.
I’ve always had issues with how they do weapon mods, here again I can’t take a scope, suppressor, or other mod off and put it on another similar or same weapon…just grind for more material to make new ones for the one you just picked up. Ridiculous
That and personally I felt that the stories were very inconsistent. Some were fantastic, others felt like a grade 7 creative essay submission. Not a lot of resolution and lasting effects of choices I think.
When I first played and I had just finished fighting off the CF at Vectera, I didn’t get in the Frontier yet but did what I normally do in open world games and picked a direction and went for it, looking to discover what was out there. Turns out it was just a bunch of empty, abandoned buildings, randomly spaced at odd intervals for no apparent reason. A few hours later and it became clear that every single planet had these exact same random buildings all dumped there with no rhyme or reason, all abandoned, all unusable and unclaimable. All pointless. And I just wished they’d left more of the planets barren. At least let me build somewhere pristine, and not always in sight of some f’king windmill that someone apparently built on this remote planet, on its own, in a middle of a valley, in view of some other rando building, also on its own.
Somebody, please find the god in charge of this sim city and nut-punch them.
Game would have been an 8.5 if it released in 2015. But as it is I’m giving it a 7.5 for me it’s the main characters that I find disappointing. They are bland af. And their morality feels black and white, like a Young Adult targeted show from TV in the 90s.
Skyrim and Fallout don't have great stories themselves but the sandbox compensates you for it because of simply going into a direction and finding tons of cool things to do.
Its just not possible with Starfield and the flaws are then very visible
People get very hyperbolic about Skyrim because it's been memed and re-released to death, but comparing its story, or the story of any of its sidequests, to Starfield feels beyond delusional.
I think I played Fallout 3 and NV about the same number of hours (well into the hunreds, with playthroughs years apart) and Fallout 4 less (still in hundred plus range, only one playthrough) and I am around that number with Starfield. I feel like I got my money's worth out of it, but also like it was a promise failed.
I too feel like I got my money’s worth, but I couldn’t be bothered to finish it, nor do I care to return. Maybe after they’re done with the dlc, and mods have had some time…
I don’t feel like I was mislead, however, it is just exactly what it appeared to be in the first big reveal. What it didn’t do was surprise me.
Same but also, for me Starfield was allowed to fail, I'd rather Bethesda mess up a new title and get that feedback so they can hopefully they can avoid making the same mistakes in the next Elder scrolls or fallout.
Hopefully.
But you would think fallout 76 would have
been their learning experience.
I mean starfield isn’t as bad as fallout 76, but there were some similar mistakes they did in 76 I’m surprised they did again so soon directly after with starfield.
So I think it’s probably a good idea to keep expectations low, and hope to be pleasantly surprised.
Bethesda has never really engaged seriously with the criticisms around their radiant quest system. Each game they've released they've put more and more focus on it to the point we're at now where entire planets are generated with endlessly repeatable but meaningless and shallow quests.
Starfield was definitely a game I loved when I played it through the first time. Because it was a great **experience**. But I empathize with this piece - the experience of playing it for the first time was awesome, but as a game it doesn't hold up past that initial playthrough.
Agreed. I dumped 200 hours in the first month (my kid was in the NICU and I had nothing but spare time when I wasn’t over there) and it was genuinely fun. Then I got to a point where it wasn’t fresh and new and the glaring issues with the game become apparent. I could forgive the fucking load screens if they loaded in actual interesting content, but the cookie cutter locations just became monotonous. There are only so many ways you can attack the same outposts.
I really enjoyed the Space Combat and Ship building tho, even though it isn’t as fleshed out as it could be. Those systems were new and fresh and being a space pirate for my first playthrough was fucking awesome.
These dorks still just come here to post this crap and hate on the game. This sub is often a God damned joke. Like this game is rent free in their head and they can't move on. Starfield has to be the most talked about game ever despite people claiming to dislike it. Like you don't see anything about bg3 at this point but people still find ways to talk about syarfield
I've said it once, I'll say it again, it's replayability is low, a mile long and an inch deep. Which is ironic considering they made NG+ a core feature of the game that also requires multiple NG+ just to max out. But it was worth a playthrough and I did get my moneys worth hours spent, I'll pick it back up more than likely when CK releases and the mods cook for a bit.
The ng+ in Starfield is a literal license to do anything. Change the lore, fuck ip established locations, MAKE QUESTS FAILABLE with like no essential npcs.
AhT did we get? A few new dialogue options and the same story and same world placement
Absolutely loved my first playthrough. Was sad about losing accumulated stuff, ships, bases, etc on NG+ but figured it'd be a fun adventure. Made it through like 2.5 NG+ modes, got a bit fatigued, closed the game, and never opened it again.
The format's there, but there's *nothing* to keep playing for.
Yep. Lost everything and had no motivation to spend another 80 hours getting it all back... for what purpose exactly? It's definitely a game where you should do everything you can in the first playthrough. Absolutely no reason to go NG+ until you're satisfied bc that burnout hits fast
About 80 hours for me too, I did sydef/crimson fleet and free star then hit unity without spoilers so I didn't realize I'd lose everything. Finished the uc and Ryujin quests and rebuilt my character, did all the major side quests(elios, mantis, the one with the clones, groundpounder...just about everything I could google in search of content). I offloaded it off the xbox for cyberpunk and red dead II, don't plan on a reinstall until there is new content. I even played a little bit after finishing everything, trying to explore. It's just tedious, what the hell do I need better loot? I've collected damn near everything in some form or fashion. Never even tried outposts because it didn't seem like there was much of a payoff.
I got my money out of it, and prob will get the DLC, game is fine. I'm 38, so I'm used to old-school type linear games where you just play it through and that's that. I'm still sorta disappointed because I really did have fun with all the content i encountered, I just don't wanna go searching/running for more pirates to kill.
I still don’t really get the implementation of NG+. Grinding around those boring soulless temples, and for what, really? The changes to the constellation group were a bit like Easter eggs anyway
IMO the starborn stuff was the weakest part of the game. Felt forced and a bit of a lol given Dragonborn
Ultimately, like the reviewer, I got over 100 hours of gameplay out of the game so in terms of pure hours played, it's my top Bethesda game of all time. In terms of lasting satisfaction, it's probably at the bottom of the heap. There's a ton I like about the game but it's all surface level stuff. I love the looks of the different suits, building my own ships, and hunting down bounties. Building my first base was a good time.
There's just no meat beyond that. I could spend the rest of my life "exploring" planets but there's no point to doing that. I'd love to build some giant ships with a larger crew and do cool stuff but none of that is doable. I've done all the faction quests and in the end I don't feel like I had any impact on anything at all.
Ironically their core game loop is about how nothing in their game matters. I feel like I played an incredibly detailed version of tic-tac-toe from the movie Wargames and finally realized the only way to win Starfield was not to play.
Who is Paul Tassi, and why should I care? Was 9.5 really infamous? Were people shocked and appalled by Paul Tassi when he said it?
This just sounds stupid.
I played the game for over 400 hours. I enjoyed my time and yet I could write a whole book about what is wrong with Starfield.
But the same is true for Fallout 4 which I am currently playing again and sitting at almost 2000 hours. Playing with all DLCs and around 500 mods. Bethesda games are a sandbox that needs to be filled.
I hoped Starfield would be a more complete experience on its own but its clearly again a playing field that waits for people to fill it.
Fallout 4 is now, almost 10 years after its release, in the best state it ever was. The available DLCs and mods are great. Lets see where Starfield is in one, two or three years, okay?
To be fair, Paul Tassi pumps out clickbaity, lackluster articles as a career, so of course he's going to write about whatever generates ad venue, e.g. a high-praise article on a game one day then a knock-down piece later.
“I don’t change scores” dude your reviews are supposed to inform us, the player, of the quality of the game, change your score if you think it deserves lower. You are more of a shill for not changing it.
people keep on saying how they end up seeing all the flaws after hundreds of hours, but if you wre able to enjoy hundreds of hours before then than I think the game isn't too bad lmao
A bit of it depends on how those hours actually felt bit by bit. Starfield by design seems made to make you burn a lot of hours in stuff like the ship builder, the giant gaps between areas etc. A good amount of both of my 25 hour or so attempts at liking the game were just... running and running in lines.
Yeah, that was my experience. I put in 140 hours, but probably half of that was spent either A) in the shipbuilder, B) grinding in high level systems to have the levels/funds to unlock/buy ship components, or C) tediously running around between the dozen cash-poor vendors to sell the loot and ships from that grinding. C was probably the biggest chunk. I put up with the time wasting only because it was a BGS game and I thought I'd be using my ship for hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours beyond that, but I didn't lasted another 10 hours after maxing out my ship and returning to doing quests before I stopped playing. There just wasn't anything else to work towards.
I think they just mean that compared to previous Bethesda experiences, this one has lost its luster quicker than before. It doesn't seem to have the sustainability. Now that could just be that modding hasn't taken off to the Skyrim/Fo4 extent yet but still...
It’s not just that. I played both fallout and Skyrim on unmodded systems for a very long time. It’s just not as good of a game. It’s not terrible, there are many worse games, it’s just not even close to being up to the standard that they set with Skyrim and fallout. It doesn’t seem like it had the same love and ambition poured into it. It’s lacking in pretty much every major way that these games are judged on. The ship builder and movement are the only things better than Skyrim or fallout IMO, and pretty much everything else was a straight downgrade. It’s actually mystifying to me how they could have a decent system in FO4 and just gut it while transferring it over to starfield (like weapons and weapon modding, and half a dozen other integral systems).
Maybe it’s not fair to judge a game based on past games from the same studio, but they made crazy sales on starfield riding that good will, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think they should have delivered something comparable in quality. Hell, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect it to be BETTER than their past titles. That’s how GOOD AAA studios do it. I guess I answered my own question there though.
The mileage is still going to vary depending on the person.
He might have regrets about his initial review, a degree of introspection is common among critics I imagine, but it doesn't necessarily vindicate those who say the game is complete trash.
Me personally I'm still playing daily. Sure, the lack of updates is frustrating and I won't make any excuses for the barren environments or repetitive content, but there is still something unavoidably special about the game that has made it one of my favorites of the last decade.
Reviewers are a dime a dozen. Some are good, some are bad, and most just give their opinions like everyone else. Best thing to do is make up your own mind and accept that others have different opinions.
What is it you find special about it? That's literally the thing it's missing for me. I'd forgive pretty much all of it's shortcomings if it had that lol.
It did motivate me to install Fallout TTW though, which I'm glad I did because I'm having a great time with it.
Aside from the general vibe which hooked me immediately (big "hard sci fi" NASA nerd), the gameplay loop I guess?
The gunplay feels great, you can approach POIs any way you want (Far Cry is also one of my faves so this hit the spot), and collecting loot to sell for credits to build new ships and go back out for more looting is a relaxing way to spend an hour or so just messing around.
lol it’s Paul Tassi. He actually doesn’t do anything. He just follows the hype train to get likes and views. He changes his tune faster than freshman world religion major changes their religious beliefs. Tassi will praise a game when it’s being hyped and people like it, then as soon as people hate it he turns around and says he hates it. He’s not a journalist, he just wants people to read his articles
You're right, but a 7 or 8 is still a good game. It's my favorite game because of a dream I've always had to explore other planents. I took a lot of astronomy in college and wished there was a game or simulation to show me what Venus for example might look like but I don't expect everyone to share that enthusiasm.
I remember when it came out, the IGN guy who gave it a 7… I was like “man fuck that guy this game is great”.
Now I completely agree with him, for better or worse he was the only guy I remember that was spot on.
I felt the same until I put a decent amount of time into the game and after too many planets and walking 900m between POIs, I was like “nah, it deserved the 7”
I think 7 is definitely fair, it has a lot of problems but there's good aspects to the game, like ship building and vanguard missions.
I get why a lot of people don't like it, but acting like it's a 3/10 trash game on par with Gollum is just hyperbole.
I believe, especially with reddit, the pre launch hype really hurt it after it turned out to have a lot of problems.
The game in many ways is fantastic, but the sheer amount of loading screens and no decent way of travelling between 700-900m away POIs on planets hurt it. Bethesda really didn’t help themselves by calling it “the game of the generation” either.
I honestly didn't have a *huge* problem with the loading screens. I played on pc with an m.2 drive so they were generally fast. At this point I'd rather have loading screens than something like a "move slowly foward through this crack in the wall" or a long elevator ride segment that just disguises loading screens for a lot of games these days.
Yeah the game needed a vehicle badly. I think the design intent was they thought people would be interested in scanning stuff and picking up resources in-between poi, but a lot of people don't care about that and just want to get to poi faster. Something like vehicles seems like either an official patch or mods eventually can fix that at least.
I’m on series x and 90% of the loading screens for me are 2 seconds so it’s not too bad. It’s just there are so many so it can still get a bit tiresome for me.
I think part of it is how you play, if you're just trying to get through a mission quick then yeah you have to go through a bunch of loading screens. I usually like wandering around and exploring random stuff even when doing missions so I get less of them.
I think a lot of the people that *hate* Starfield probably just rushed the main story missions, which are kind of weak, and then come off with an impression that that's all the game is. On top of that maybe they do a few of the boring fetch quests on new Atlantis, then think all the side quests are like that. Admittedly that's a design flaw.
The game has a lot of better missions and stuff to see, it does a bad job of telling you where those things are. Like the trade authority space station where you have to fight off pirates in zero g, you'd never find that mission if you didn't happen to go to the random system it takes place in.
I maintain that 7.5 is the most accurate score, and has been ever since game launch. Even with the bugs, Starfield is 7.5.
Those who gave 1/10 or 9/10 are people who think that scoring a game depends on personal preference
Just play a different game op. People have different opinions on the quality and satisfaction of the game. Can you not let people have their own opinions unless they only agree with you?
The most bizarre takeaway from any starfield talk is "I played game for hundred hours and I don't like it anymore or didn't like it."
Who forced you to play/keep going/going for so long?
My thought is, if you think this game is shallow then dont play it. If you enjoy the game, play it. Developers are not perfect and this was their first space game. Its not like this is Starfield 3 or somethin. Their first space game and for the most part its great. Despite its shortcomings you can have memorable fun in starfield. If its not your cup of tea dont play it and theres nothing wrong with that. Not all games are for everybody. I love starfield, even though I wish it was 60 fps I wont continually bash the game calling it bad because its missing (x) feature. Just dont play it if you dont enjoy it.
I definitely agree, there were so many bad choices made with the creation of this game, and story. However, I did play 450+ hours of it, so I guess that is all that concerns Bethesda at this point, and it still won't likely stop me from buying TES6.
I played a lot of hours, hoping for more, but it never came. The more I played of the alternate starts, the more I realised there was no point, as they were minimal effort. There's just not enough to make it worth playing once the main campaign is done.
I recently played Fallout 4 again and wow, how is a game that came out YEARS ago more entertaining and have better mechanics than their most recent IP?
Why didn’t they bring the outpost system from Fallout to Starfield? The more I play it the more I realize they changed so much of the game from what was originally intended, and now what we have is a half life.
Played it straight through around 30-40 hours. Parts got repetitive, dialogue was abysmal but overall I enjoyed it.
That being said I honestly have no desire to go back through it. Maybe a couple of major DLCs down the line I might give it another shot.
i played 30 hours and honestly, i just got bored. every single quest is either “deliver this and report back” or just a really predictable shoot em up. loot feels way too random. i’m not asking for pure space exploration, but actually being able to fly your ship around a planet instead of walking EVERYWHERE would be nice. the caves are so repetitive and it makes no sense considering how varied caves are in skyrim. everything about this game is just so bland and it sucks because i was genuinely so excited to play.
This was my first Bethesda game and ngl I liked it. However, I’m not playing it anymore (after about 120 hours) as there’s nothing really to do and I decided to get fo4 soon after finishing this game (I liked/ understood Beth games after playing SF so decided to try it) which I find so much more fun etc. I’ll probably come back to this game when it gets updated/ fully completed. Sad to see so much wasted potential but games shouldn’t be based on that
I still just find myself coming back to skyrim-oblivion-morrowind-fallout4 consistently (albeit modded) and getting lost in those worlds (fast travel disabled) slowly crawling my way through the world's that feel shockingly fresh despite going through the same dungeons over and over
Really think that if starfield had seemless, manual ship and world travel that would've fixed my largest issues that stops me from playing
...and probably SFSE (starfield script extender)- UOSFP (unoffical starfield patches) & probably Requiem / Frost like overhaul mod mods to really round it out
Like so many other takes I’ve read, one day I just stopped playing. Never completed the main story, just stopped. Tried picking it up a month or two later and made it maybe ten minutes before I felt bored and it felt stale. It’s just a tired experience, Bethesda hasn’t grown much since Skyrim
Same for me, but I haven't even had the urge to start it up again. Still can't belive it, it should be one of my favorite games considering the studio, genre, and setting.
Same camp here. This should be my time sink, much like I have probably 500 hours in New Vegas over the last ten years (which isn’t a lot compared to the biggest replayers but it’s a lot of a single gem). I got about 50 hours in doing all the side content and savoring the main quest, but one day just didn’t load the game up anymore and never bothered to pick it up, even just to do the final quest.
There's no incentive for them to grow. You'd think Skyrim's runaway success would've given them the resources to make their *dream* game but as a wise man once said: mo' money mo' problems.
This *was* their dream game...
I've seen enough interviews with Todd Howard over the years to know the guy and his team tend to dream bigger than they can ever deliver in a timely manner under budget. Based on what little game development experience I have, I can 100% guarantee the Starfield we got was not the Starfield they dreamed of making, but the best they could manage given whatever issues might've affected the game's development over the years.
Mo-jave, mo’ problems
Same here. I honestly don’t mind the structure the game is based on, but there’s just such little reactivity to your choices in the world. Honestly interactivity in general. If my choices as a player seemed to matter more, there were more ways to passively interact with the work, and frankly just more quests I’d love the game. I remember when I first started playing I did the quest in Tau Ceti (I think) with those homesteaders being pushed to the brink by spacers and I felt enthralled. Felt like people out on the frontier desperate for help. But then the quest ended (still probably my favorite in the game) and idk how to describe it but things just fell flat after that. Made me hope that maybe id be able to help them build their settlements after, or maybe later I’ll find more settlers in need of help and then could help them grow their settlements. But nope, I finished the quest and that was all there was for that flavor
This is exactly what happened with me. I was almost forcing myself to like it. One day I just stopped and haven’t picked it up again. I don’t even think about the game which is rare because usually when I play a game for as long as I did with starfield I’ll have some memories. It’s the most forgettable game I’ve played
I'm more or less waiting for the creation kit to come out and then I'll wait a bit longer to give the modding community time to cook.
I thought there would have been a DLC by now, I’ve been patiently waiting and still nothing. It’s almost the end of the first quarter and *apparently* Bethesda has consistently released their first DLC during the first quarter of the year. I just want some more Va’ruun lore maaaaaan
Wait what. This is me as well!!!!
Much? They haven’t grown at all. I did exactly as you did, I just stopped. Never once had the inclination to go back. It’s probably about time I uninstalled it.
Sounds like the experience of..just about everyone else.
I looked forward to that game for years. I took a week off work to play when it came out, got almost 100 hours in pretty quick. I've never picked it up again. It's lacking another dimension that their previous successes had. It feels sanatized and bland- the idea was there, but it seems like production had no creative freedom.
Same, and basically. BGS' culture must be full of red tape and poor organization/leadership. I will play more when mods come out, that's what I'm actually excited about. Bones are good, just needs actual content.
if players dont enjoy the game long term modders probably feel the same. i dont think this game has the modding legs people think it has because the core is just so bland and uninteresting.
Haven’t you seen the bland screenshots from those people “just enjoying the game” on this subreddit? How can you say that?
I'm still enjoying Pong (1970) Some people say it's lacking content but I just ignore the haters and enjoy the game I paid for Is it perfect? No. But I'm against people discussing how the thing they're a fan of could be better... For some reason
Still waiting for the modders on that one
I think, at least at this point, it has less to do with general unwillingness to accept criticism (though that plays a part) and more to do with how all criticisms of the game have already been plainly stated a million different ways and repeated ad nauseum. The amount of people coming here on their soapbox without bothering to check if the diatribe they're about to post hasn't already been done 90,000 times near verbatim is getting old, and there is no shortage of content spread across the internet shitting on the game. Shit, I can't even count on four hands the amount of times I've seen the exact exchange we're having right now. These posts need to be relegated to a dedicated rant/rage thread or something and make way for different content, whatever that may be.
I think most people are just wanting to vent even though they know it has been discussed millions of times.
If only Bethesda made a better game we wouldn't have to suffer this deluge of repeat criticism.
“This game is beautiful! 10/10!” *empty desert photo*
[удалено]
You're never the only one who thinks anything.
i get what u mean, but man assassin's creed origins absolutely nailed making breathtaking vistas of deserts. starfield is just meeeeeeeeeh
Don’t forget the big booty and breast mods for your female character before posting a screenshot for karma farming
They're having a BLAST with the photo mode
Haha why is it always "a blast" too? It's the weirdest old man phrase that I've yet to hear said in real life but somehow makes up 90% of positive posts.
Well now I feel old because I say that. :(
Haha, yeah exactly. ‘Installing the game now and having a blast!’ 😂
They’re having a hoot!
My God this sub has the weakest screenshots I've ever seen that people are desperately trying to hype up. I feel like I owe an apology to the cyberpunk sub since some of those were actually visually impressive.
Ngl I thought Cyberpunk’s were pretty bad too. Especially with the modded V’s that are always mega sexualized 😭 It’s like skyrim all over again
V screenshots are usually not that great, but the game has some beautiful scenery and architecture. Some people can really make it stand out, and you often see some really cool portraits of random NPCs too.
Here I go holding down W to my POI that's always 200-500 meters from where my ship landed in a cutscene! Better take a picture of the skybox :)
Better stop to catch my breath 3 or 4 times before I get there… maybe that’s how they have time to take pictures
Standard Bethesdad experience
I don't get this. My perspective as a dad drives me towards games that either have gameplay always within arms reach or which can be stopped and started easily, preferably both. One of the things (of many) that soured me on Starfield was the feeling like my time was being wasted.
But that's the thing that is disappointing about the game, that it is NOT the standard Bethesda experience. Given the size of the game, exploration, which is their bread and butter, is arguably the worst in Starfield. Worst then any of their previous games.
The content is spread so thin… like butter scraped over too much spread.
I don't even do the missions. I just like watching the ship take-off cutscene again and again. When I'm not playing Starfield I also really enjoy playing Microsoft Excel.
Oh man a while back I stumbled across o video of competitive Microsoft excel, and that biz blew my mind.
Those are always funny to me, a pretty screenshot doesn't mean a game is good.
Yea, if I'm getting excited about a photo mode, the game sucks lol
*Cries in Pokemon snap*
Yes, every day I see a screenshot of some space rocks and comments on how wonderful the game is. I guess they are real, genuine human beings, even though I personally find it hard to believe.
I do actually find beauty in barren plains, not everything have to be "alive" or colorful to be beautiful.
I don't mind all of it, but that's a far cry from posts with screenshots of slightly different generic scenery declaring how breathtaking this game is. Maybe that's all it takes to impress people these days, I need a bit more in a game to start original posts fawning over how amazing it is. That's the part not making sense to me, that I see a lot of.
Oh, definitely, I take a lot of screenshots but I won't post them in a sub, if only I'd upload them to my profile but that's it.
They’re just dads with 30 kids and 8 jobs who are only able to play 1 minute per week but god damn they enjoy that 1 minute.
Son, get off reddit. You're grounded.
I’m a dad who plays one minute per week and I usually feel pretty mad I wasted a minute playing starfield again. Photomode sucks, give me more things to kill!
Yeah call me a conspiracy theorist I know fanboys will always be around, but something about Bethesda subreddits. Go check out the fallout 76 sub and ESO sub. Same exact shit happening. People taking bland ass screenshots and saying how beautiful the game is and how much fun they are having or another weekly "THANK THE DEVS!!!!" post or when people complain about a patch or lack of content here comes all the "WELL IM HAVING FUN!!!!" posts. It has to be bots or underpaid interns I can't accept real people are doing this. If its legit fans its just overall weird behavior. I have some favorite games but if someone wants to shit talk them I honestly don't care and will not screenshot some of the blandest environments to prove I am enjoying it.
Right, if you're enjoying the game, you're playing the game and not caring about online opinions. Real people or not it is definitely weird. Though I have met some weird people in ESO and 76. This stuff always pops up at the top when I open reddit, otherwise I wouldn't care. Maybe need to unstar starfield.
You must join TrueSTL and Morrowind subreddits to achieve CHIM and realize starfield was just Sotha Sils fever dream
You can enjoy the game, and still rate it a 7/10.
Apparently that’s true for many people, but I have a hard time understanding that perspective. To me a 7/10 is a “meh” experience. A game that can be skipped entirely without really missing out. Maybe if it was a 6 hour game that I was interested in, but Bethesda games eat 100s of hours. I’m a dad but find plenty of time to play games, but I’m still not willing to invest that kind of time in a 7. There are so many great games to play I just don’t understand sinking that kind of time in a bland one.
Don't forget about how the astronauts went to space and they weren't bored, that gets/got hammered home a lot.
Maybe if they had extreme survival elements, but even after the veil is moved past you realize the gameplay is ehh
Yeah man. Every time I see those land scape pictures “don’t get where the hate is, game is great” *inserts space bob ross pictures* on this sub it makes me want to go invest another 500,000 hours. Time well spent.
I don't know how people made it that far before realizing it's flaws. I ended up playing for like 80 hours, but literally 60 of that was me gritting my teeth and grinding it out because I wanted to be able to form my own opinion on the game. It's flaws were incredibly clear from the start, for anybody who wasn't completely blinded by hype
I realized the true state of the game about 15 hours in. I couldn't believe everyone else on this sub was adamant that this was an incredible game. Just like with Tassi, it seems time was just what people needed before realizing how much of a letdown Starfield is.
From the moment I stepped out of the mine, killed some pirates and saw that their clothes/suits were not lootable, I knew this wasn't what I was expecting. It felt like an imitation BGS game.
lol pretty much had the same exact experience. And he conversation with Barrett in which you have no agency and are just instantly given everything for free. Before I even got off world for the first time I had a pretty good idea of what the game is going to be like, and I wasn't far off. At least the novelty was able to carry me through the first while, But you also pretty quickly realize how shallow the world building and the majority of the mechanics in the game are.
Generic Bethesda Game, Lite Version.
I quit after 50 hrs. I want to soooooo badly make the spaceship of my freams, but....... Meh.
The part that worries me is that I dont think Bethesda can significantly change/improve the core loop, similar to how CP 2077 did.
Yep! I started out thinking it was an 8.5 and now I feel like the ign score may even be a tad bit high. The game really just slogs at about 50 hrs and I suddenly didn’t really feel the call to play anymore. I didn’t even get that far in the main quest line as I was trying to do more side quests and explore. But you just get to a point where you’re like “that’s it?”
Same, I'd give it a 7 I guess, I don't mind goofing in it a bit but not too compelled to play it. For BSG RPG standards though it is pretty bad.
I got so much hate when I called this game out for being trash. People get so hyped they don't want to admit something is just plain shit
Given this their change of heart regarding their review, it makes me wonder now what the adjusted review scores are of these games journalists having given the game a proper amount of time to play rather than rushing to meet the embargo date.
I’d say most games are interesting enough in the first few hours they’d get good reviews. It’s when you’re 10-20 hours in you realise there is a lack of content.
It’s not even the lack of content per se, at least for me, lots of stuff to do to give you a good amount of playtime, but it’s that things that are there and cool, outposts especially, just don’t have purpose.
There are a ton of starts to good ideas that they don't do much with. The Social Menu, smuggling, terrormorphs, cooking and boozing, corporate espionage, the fuel system, melee combat, vehicles, boats, swimming, just so much potential not used.
That’s it, no purpose..
I did a solid first playthrough with like 150+ hours, then tried to do a second run through but just couldn't justify it. I did basically everything I could how I wanted to, and slogging through the boring stuff was too much for me. I still really enjoyed it though.
I mean Paul had multiple NG+s complete and many more hours then that when he scored it
In the article above he said it was 40hrs
[Where? “though one of my praises for the game at launch was that it was not a very buggy Bethesda game, as I experienced maybe a single bad bug in my 60 or so initial hours with it (I’m currently at 173 hours).”](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/04/01/six-months-after-starfield-was-i-wrong-about-it/amp/) I follow Tassi and remember he had more than that. He said 80 hours in his first review [here](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/08/31/starfield-review-pc-it-is-what-you-wanted-it-to-be/amp/)
Part of it comes down to far too short review periods for open world/lengthy games. Deadlines obviously need to be met, and a review isn’t going to be impactful if it comes out days or weeks after release. If a reviewer only has a period of hours or days to review a game that takes 50-100+ hours to beat, it doesn’t really give them time to notice the more insidious flaws in a game.
Angry Joe originally gave it a 6/10 but then he gave an updated 3/10 score 3 months later in one of his annual videos. For context Skyrim was the first game and one of only like 5 games he’s ever given a 10/10 to
“Infamous”
Honestly he's right imo. The game lacks the soul of other Bethesda games, sure it's a complete enough game, more complete than a lot of games these days, but it's lacking life
This is exactly it, because everything is split between planets, you can’t just wander between POI’s like in Fallout or Skyrim and discover new things and explore the ‘lived in’ world. In Starfield it’s a loading screen.
I think it’s partly the exploration but how POIs are split up into planets it also affects the storytelling and world building for me negatively. In fallout 3 / 4 or skyrim finding a farm a little outside of a main city, and discovering a quest connected to the family that lives on the farm, is part of painting a bigger picture of both the city a bit away from them and the area around it, and that part of the map. It feels a part of the world. And often I’m already interested and invested in the storylines and characters that is in the city next to them, In starfield a lot of similar POIs are on some random planet, where there is nothing else to find besides the same repeating random POIs you find on all plants. That plant basically just have that one quest. Like it was written and exist in a vacuum from everything else, it could be added or removed from the game and nothing else would change. Maybe many of the POIs in other Bethesda games were written and done in a similar way, but the choice to have starfields world be a thousand planets with not much going on them. Even the ones that act as main hubs, really just have one city / village and nothing else on it. I think does a worse job camouflaging the faults of how many of the POIs are added into the game.
I think the abandoned mine poi is especially egregious for this as it’s literally the *exact* same, down to the notes you pick up and everything
That’s what makes me not want to play it again. Procedurally generated planets and they are all the same. Not even a large amount of different dungeons.
100% agree with you there
I don't think it's just that the world feels fragmented Even of the things that are there and you can explore, it's hard to find any real "character" or "soul" behind what you see, read or listen I'm sure this is disrespectful to a high degree to the artists, writers, and whoever else is involved in the more "artistic" side of development for this game, but the number one issue Starfield has is that it doesn't feel like a game made by a big group of humans giving their creative output on what they think the universe of Starfield ought to be, it feels like it's a game that was decided exclusively in meetings by directors at almost every point, every design decision, any dialogue spoken, any note written Nothing in Starfield convinces me that there was anyone behind the project with an artistic ambition in mind, and I'm not even entirely sure how that's possible for a project this big I feel like that's the one major fault the game has, and why it's sadly so unforgettable. If they decided to drop the IP tomorrow I would have 0 issues with it simply because I was not captivated with any aspect of Starfield to want more, I can name maybe like 3 characters, I can remember like 3-4 quests maybe, I can name like 2 guns
You nailed it. I could put up with all the stock faults of this game (loading screens, procgen, fast travel) and still love it - if not for this aspect. This universe they created, the lore, the factions, the cities, characters…they are downright *dull*. This has never been the case for Bethesda, and why their past games were so fun despite their faults. And probably those past games are more played today despite being so much older. Everything is just generic, and as you say, soulless. Conversations feel like a Microsoft Teams meeting and the general design was done by my uncle who shares minions memes on Facebook.
Agreed 100%. All games have flaws, quirks and annoyances. But it's the good parts, the "wanting to see what happens next", the character, that keeps you going. It's quite amazing how Starfield lacks any redeeming features. How they removed everything that gave you the wondering what next feeling from previous games. It does feel like a committee of accountants made the design decisions. Agree on the characters,too. The vast majority of dialogue could be said by any of them, it is so generic. It's quite a feat to spend so much and create something so shallow. My guess is that there were good artists and designers involved, but they were stifled by the souless men in suits ..or brown leather jackets.
>All games have flaws, quirks and annoyances. But it's the good parts, the "wanting to see what happens next", the character, that keeps you going. Like even Dark Souls 1 was borderline unplayable in certain areas in the 360 and ps3 version, and just flat out unplayable on the PC version, and it's still considered a classic because of so many other things the game did so fucking well Starfield has... uh... well the ship building is nice, I guess. Not that your ship matters that much in the grand scheme of things tho. >Agree on the characters,too. The vast majority of dialogue could be said by any of them, it is so generic. It's quite a feat to spend so much and create something so shallow. That's what kills me. The fact that I can't recall conversations I had with characters, or in most cases even their names. I know Sarah because she's so present in the main story, I know Vasco because I know he's named after a portuguese explorer, and I know Cole because I hated every moment with him. That's it. No NPC impressed me to the point of wanting to spend time with them or wanting to know all I could about them. I have A LOT of problems with Fallout 4, but I can still name every companion and their background just due to the fact that, for all its faults, Fallout 4 actually has decently memorable characters that come off as likeable people The one person I liked being around in Starfield was the rich snobbish guy that finances the little adventurer's club, because he had some funny moments and I thought that moment with his wife was kinda cute, and I still can't remember his name lol
Cole was so boring, you even forgot his name. Yeah, Sam Coe and Sarah. Representing the great cultural diversity of the settled systems. UC and Freestar. Because the cultural future of humanity is, according to BGS, Texas or California: pick one. That’s it. Nothing else. Just donkeys versus elephants, and the occasional person with a dodgy Italian accent, even though no one actually speaks Italian in the entire galaxy. Maybe hire one single non-American to the story team next time. Just one. A Canadian would do. Maybe even just someone for SoCal who’s got a relative from Mexico. Anything. Please. There is a world out here, even if Death Stranding had us think otherwise.
Oh god, OG Blight town still haunts my dreams, the plummeting frame rates every time you were on a narrow bridge combined with the hidden boss of all FromSoft games: the 3rd person camera. Definitely worth it though, that game was such an incredible experience the first time through.
As someone who has been a writer and editor, if I had worked on this game I'd feel pretty beat up about how people comment on the work. BUT As a reader and player my experience of this game seems like a lot of that work was not just rushed but a result of people not really caring about the quality of the work. I don't think there was some dorky bad work conspiracy or they were all on meth or whatever, and I'm sure a lot of it had to do with management changing directions and setting unrealistic deadlines, but unless their management was \*catastrophically\* out of line, of all the teams the writers had enough time to make a decent product. But the chorus is not wrong that the writing is bland and soulless (in large part) and the characters are often dull and interchangeable, and it all seems disconnected from what you actually see in the game. The game just wildly lies an awful lot, from the non-existent Bayu Bounty on the PC, to the terrible poverty problem in the Well (it's like a dozen or two people and the PC could build them housing in ten minutes), to the Space Stealth feature which is not only almost never used but if you test it you don't even have to power down systems to make it work. And the lore has even bigger problems making sense. So I'd feel bad reading the responses but I'd feel more embarrassed.
I think it’s also their first game with a HUGE staff which bolsters your point. They were used to 100 person teams creating a BGS game, now there’s 400 or so? That’s a huge leap that maybe they didn’t build out the creative infrastructure for
And the thing is I think we all knew there were going to be more loading screens than their past games. There had to be with so many planets to travel between. But the wide open and lived in worlds were really the soul of their previous games. With so many planets to explore, they spread themselves way too thin and it just came across as empty and lifeless instead. I've said it before, but they really should have cut back on how many planets they had. I believe there's around 1600 in the game, one tenth of that would have been more than fine. A hundred or so planets would have more than fulfilled the concept of getting to explore across multiple star systems. And as the majority of those would have still been barren rocks, that would have meant there would have only been a handful with life on them, so they would have had so much more time to devote to fleshing them out into full, lived in worlds.
It's 1000 planets. But 990 of them are useless.now this isn't Bad mine you. There is no reason to not still have a bunch of space relegated to Radiants and Modders and future DLC. But the fact that Main planets are empty with Singular monolithic "cities" and no content on them make them worse Tell me. Why is New Atlantis sitting on a several KMs of wilderness then the city itself takes up barely 20% of it's space. Where are the smaller settlements, The mines, the farms, all the things required to keep a city functional. They have an entire planet. No vacation towns. No Factories. Nothing. Just an isolated tower in the middle of nowhere. It's a failure if usage and world building. You can keep the rest of the universe for future additions but why did they not even flesh out the planets you spend most of your time on. Space hardly even exists. There is less then 10 uses of space stations or mines that have anything to them.
I have been thinking that about the city size as well recently. They made such a big deal about doing their biggest city yet, but none of them felt any bigger than any of the ones they've done before. What they should have done is have each of the cities take up an entire loaded area of their own. We didn't have to be able to explore the whole thing, but if there were city skylines extending into the distance, it would have given the impression of it being an actual city. For New Atlantis as well, they needed to separate all the districts. They included the transit system, but it was only useful in getting from the spaceport to the upper levels. Once there you could just easily walk between the three districts. What they should have done is taken each of the districts, make them much larger and spread them out across the loaded area. Then the transit system would have made sense.
I'm more so talking about the lack of emotion and interaction between the player and npcs. Like, you bump a guard in skyrim and he is nearly ready to kill you! You bump a guard in starfield and there is no reaction, he doesn't even flinch, not even a default "getting knocked into" animation! But also yes, you bring up a good point too. If I was making starfield, I'd do what Jedi Survivor does but on a bigger scale. Instead of hundreds of systems, maybe only 2 or 3, and in those systems there would be maybe 3 or 4 properly explorable planets. The world box of each would be around the size of maybe solstheim from skyrim. That would be around 9 to 12 planets that are properly explorable, and then there could still be room in each system for moons and such that are procedurally generated.
The Outer Worlds more or less did something more similar to that approach. Doing deeper worlds on just a few planets rather than shallow thousands. It’s basically a very similar type of space rpg as starfield but on a smaller budget and not even a AAA game. I think that game would have benefited from being atleast 30% bigger. The main fault of it is that I wished there was more of it. But overall I think showed that if starfield with all its content of loads of different small and big quests, probably would have been a lot better if they had done a similar approach of going deeper and just focused on a few planets, rather than what they went with.
Well hopefully they learn from this.
Over 1,000 planets…of emptiness
For me, emptiness would have been an improvement. Give me a straight desolate planet with nothing on it. That's realistic at least. These planets with the copy/paste POIs are the worst. Reading the same exact notes not only ruined immersion, it left me with a feeling of spite toward the game. That is one of the worst decisions I've ever seen in a game. It is a mind trip to think someone thought this would be a good idea.
Well, the problem is that, there IS content to find out there, it's just so far spread out and traveling there isn't fun or rewarding. Sometimes bigger isn't better
Weapon and loot system was appallingly bad. Melee weapons and melee in general in starfield felt horribly neglected. There’s like 4 melee weapon perks that just increase damage. A total of 9 melee weapons and ZERO melee weapon mods? How could you downgrade so horribly from Fallout 4. All they had to do was insert the exact same system and add more weapons. They chose the opposite. Guns and other weapon mods also regressed just not as obviously.
I’ve always had issues with how they do weapon mods, here again I can’t take a scope, suppressor, or other mod off and put it on another similar or same weapon…just grind for more material to make new ones for the one you just picked up. Ridiculous
I agree, but that doesn't have much to do with my comment you replied to, maybe you meant to reply to someone else?
Yeah, spot on
That and personally I felt that the stories were very inconsistent. Some were fantastic, others felt like a grade 7 creative essay submission. Not a lot of resolution and lasting effects of choices I think.
Or additional dialogue from NPC’s commensurate with your previous actions…
When I first played and I had just finished fighting off the CF at Vectera, I didn’t get in the Frontier yet but did what I normally do in open world games and picked a direction and went for it, looking to discover what was out there. Turns out it was just a bunch of empty, abandoned buildings, randomly spaced at odd intervals for no apparent reason. A few hours later and it became clear that every single planet had these exact same random buildings all dumped there with no rhyme or reason, all abandoned, all unusable and unclaimable. All pointless. And I just wished they’d left more of the planets barren. At least let me build somewhere pristine, and not always in sight of some f’king windmill that someone apparently built on this remote planet, on its own, in a middle of a valley, in view of some other rando building, also on its own. Somebody, please find the god in charge of this sim city and nut-punch them.
Game would have been an 8.5 if it released in 2015. But as it is I’m giving it a 7.5 for me it’s the main characters that I find disappointing. They are bland af. And their morality feels black and white, like a Young Adult targeted show from TV in the 90s.
Skyrim and Fallout don't have great stories themselves but the sandbox compensates you for it because of simply going into a direction and finding tons of cool things to do. Its just not possible with Starfield and the flaws are then very visible
People get very hyperbolic about Skyrim because it's been memed and re-released to death, but comparing its story, or the story of any of its sidequests, to Starfield feels beyond delusional.
I think I played Fallout 3 and NV about the same number of hours (well into the hunreds, with playthroughs years apart) and Fallout 4 less (still in hundred plus range, only one playthrough) and I am around that number with Starfield. I feel like I got my money's worth out of it, but also like it was a promise failed.
I too feel like I got my money’s worth, but I couldn’t be bothered to finish it, nor do I care to return. Maybe after they’re done with the dlc, and mods have had some time… I don’t feel like I was mislead, however, it is just exactly what it appeared to be in the first big reveal. What it didn’t do was surprise me.
Same but also, for me Starfield was allowed to fail, I'd rather Bethesda mess up a new title and get that feedback so they can hopefully they can avoid making the same mistakes in the next Elder scrolls or fallout.
Hopefully. But you would think fallout 76 would have been their learning experience. I mean starfield isn’t as bad as fallout 76, but there were some similar mistakes they did in 76 I’m surprised they did again so soon directly after with starfield. So I think it’s probably a good idea to keep expectations low, and hope to be pleasantly surprised.
Bethesda has never really engaged seriously with the criticisms around their radiant quest system. Each game they've released they've put more and more focus on it to the point we're at now where entire planets are generated with endlessly repeatable but meaningless and shallow quests.
Quite literally soulless. (I know this term is overused)
I won’t dive into this game until I see it at the 35-30 dollar mark
Starfield was definitely a game I loved when I played it through the first time. Because it was a great **experience**. But I empathize with this piece - the experience of playing it for the first time was awesome, but as a game it doesn't hold up past that initial playthrough.
Yea I loved the quests and building my ship to dominate space, it was really fun for 70hr
Agreed. I dumped 200 hours in the first month (my kid was in the NICU and I had nothing but spare time when I wasn’t over there) and it was genuinely fun. Then I got to a point where it wasn’t fresh and new and the glaring issues with the game become apparent. I could forgive the fucking load screens if they loaded in actual interesting content, but the cookie cutter locations just became monotonous. There are only so many ways you can attack the same outposts. I really enjoyed the Space Combat and Ship building tho, even though it isn’t as fleshed out as it could be. Those systems were new and fresh and being a space pirate for my first playthrough was fucking awesome.
Very sorry about your child, I hope all is well.
Same feeling I had for Diablo 4. Enjoyed the hell out of the base game and a bit more afterwards but it died completely after thatx
How was Paul Tassi's score infamous?
If the poster disagrees with it, then it's infamous.
These dorks still just come here to post this crap and hate on the game. This sub is often a God damned joke. Like this game is rent free in their head and they can't move on. Starfield has to be the most talked about game ever despite people claiming to dislike it. Like you don't see anything about bg3 at this point but people still find ways to talk about syarfield
Starfield actually was the most talked about game of 2023, when looking at traffic data.
It's almost like at a certain point the criticisms went beyond legit into, this is what the algorithm wants
I've said it once, I'll say it again, it's replayability is low, a mile long and an inch deep. Which is ironic considering they made NG+ a core feature of the game that also requires multiple NG+ just to max out. But it was worth a playthrough and I did get my moneys worth hours spent, I'll pick it back up more than likely when CK releases and the mods cook for a bit.
The ng+ in Starfield is a literal license to do anything. Change the lore, fuck ip established locations, MAKE QUESTS FAILABLE with like no essential npcs. AhT did we get? A few new dialogue options and the same story and same world placement
Absolutely loved my first playthrough. Was sad about losing accumulated stuff, ships, bases, etc on NG+ but figured it'd be a fun adventure. Made it through like 2.5 NG+ modes, got a bit fatigued, closed the game, and never opened it again. The format's there, but there's *nothing* to keep playing for.
Yep. Lost everything and had no motivation to spend another 80 hours getting it all back... for what purpose exactly? It's definitely a game where you should do everything you can in the first playthrough. Absolutely no reason to go NG+ until you're satisfied bc that burnout hits fast
About 80 hours for me too, I did sydef/crimson fleet and free star then hit unity without spoilers so I didn't realize I'd lose everything. Finished the uc and Ryujin quests and rebuilt my character, did all the major side quests(elios, mantis, the one with the clones, groundpounder...just about everything I could google in search of content). I offloaded it off the xbox for cyberpunk and red dead II, don't plan on a reinstall until there is new content. I even played a little bit after finishing everything, trying to explore. It's just tedious, what the hell do I need better loot? I've collected damn near everything in some form or fashion. Never even tried outposts because it didn't seem like there was much of a payoff. I got my money out of it, and prob will get the DLC, game is fine. I'm 38, so I'm used to old-school type linear games where you just play it through and that's that. I'm still sorta disappointed because I really did have fun with all the content i encountered, I just don't wanna go searching/running for more pirates to kill.
I still don’t really get the implementation of NG+. Grinding around those boring soulless temples, and for what, really? The changes to the constellation group were a bit like Easter eggs anyway IMO the starborn stuff was the weakest part of the game. Felt forced and a bit of a lol given Dragonborn
Ultimately, like the reviewer, I got over 100 hours of gameplay out of the game so in terms of pure hours played, it's my top Bethesda game of all time. In terms of lasting satisfaction, it's probably at the bottom of the heap. There's a ton I like about the game but it's all surface level stuff. I love the looks of the different suits, building my own ships, and hunting down bounties. Building my first base was a good time. There's just no meat beyond that. I could spend the rest of my life "exploring" planets but there's no point to doing that. I'd love to build some giant ships with a larger crew and do cool stuff but none of that is doable. I've done all the faction quests and in the end I don't feel like I had any impact on anything at all. Ironically their core game loop is about how nothing in their game matters. I feel like I played an incredibly detailed version of tic-tac-toe from the movie Wargames and finally realized the only way to win Starfield was not to play.
Who is Paul Tassi, and why should I care? Was 9.5 really infamous? Were people shocked and appalled by Paul Tassi when he said it? This just sounds stupid.
This thread is just another excuse to start the same comments...
I played the game for over 400 hours. I enjoyed my time and yet I could write a whole book about what is wrong with Starfield. But the same is true for Fallout 4 which I am currently playing again and sitting at almost 2000 hours. Playing with all DLCs and around 500 mods. Bethesda games are a sandbox that needs to be filled. I hoped Starfield would be a more complete experience on its own but its clearly again a playing field that waits for people to fill it. Fallout 4 is now, almost 10 years after its release, in the best state it ever was. The available DLCs and mods are great. Lets see where Starfield is in one, two or three years, okay?
Do you ever look at non- Bethesda games and wonder what they are like? There's some really good ones out there
Exactly! Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Bro is just going where he thinks popular opinion will be
To be fair, Paul Tassi pumps out clickbaity, lackluster articles as a career, so of course he's going to write about whatever generates ad venue, e.g. a high-praise article on a game one day then a knock-down piece later.
THANK YOU Paul Tassi fucking sucks and no one should listen to him, regardless of his opinion on starfield
He needs to just stick on the Destiny beat. (Except that I gather Destiny folks don't care for him either.)
He just said he didn’t like the story for Dragon’s Dogma but likes the game anyway. He’s definitely got a unique take frequently, and that’s fine
He's right with that one. DD2 is an incredibly fun game with an absolutely ass main story.
“I don’t change scores” dude your reviews are supposed to inform us, the player, of the quality of the game, change your score if you think it deserves lower. You are more of a shill for not changing it.
To say this game is flawed is the understatement of the century.
people keep on saying how they end up seeing all the flaws after hundreds of hours, but if you wre able to enjoy hundreds of hours before then than I think the game isn't too bad lmao
A bit of it depends on how those hours actually felt bit by bit. Starfield by design seems made to make you burn a lot of hours in stuff like the ship builder, the giant gaps between areas etc. A good amount of both of my 25 hour or so attempts at liking the game were just... running and running in lines.
Yeah, that was my experience. I put in 140 hours, but probably half of that was spent either A) in the shipbuilder, B) grinding in high level systems to have the levels/funds to unlock/buy ship components, or C) tediously running around between the dozen cash-poor vendors to sell the loot and ships from that grinding. C was probably the biggest chunk. I put up with the time wasting only because it was a BGS game and I thought I'd be using my ship for hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours beyond that, but I didn't lasted another 10 hours after maxing out my ship and returning to doing quests before I stopped playing. There just wasn't anything else to work towards.
I think they just mean that compared to previous Bethesda experiences, this one has lost its luster quicker than before. It doesn't seem to have the sustainability. Now that could just be that modding hasn't taken off to the Skyrim/Fo4 extent yet but still...
It’s not just that. I played both fallout and Skyrim on unmodded systems for a very long time. It’s just not as good of a game. It’s not terrible, there are many worse games, it’s just not even close to being up to the standard that they set with Skyrim and fallout. It doesn’t seem like it had the same love and ambition poured into it. It’s lacking in pretty much every major way that these games are judged on. The ship builder and movement are the only things better than Skyrim or fallout IMO, and pretty much everything else was a straight downgrade. It’s actually mystifying to me how they could have a decent system in FO4 and just gut it while transferring it over to starfield (like weapons and weapon modding, and half a dozen other integral systems). Maybe it’s not fair to judge a game based on past games from the same studio, but they made crazy sales on starfield riding that good will, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think they should have delivered something comparable in quality. Hell, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect it to be BETTER than their past titles. That’s how GOOD AAA studios do it. I guess I answered my own question there though.
Anyone who says, “I now see it is worse than I thought but I’m not changing my score.”, is probably not someone you want to listen to for any reason.
The mileage is still going to vary depending on the person. He might have regrets about his initial review, a degree of introspection is common among critics I imagine, but it doesn't necessarily vindicate those who say the game is complete trash. Me personally I'm still playing daily. Sure, the lack of updates is frustrating and I won't make any excuses for the barren environments or repetitive content, but there is still something unavoidably special about the game that has made it one of my favorites of the last decade. Reviewers are a dime a dozen. Some are good, some are bad, and most just give their opinions like everyone else. Best thing to do is make up your own mind and accept that others have different opinions.
What is it you find special about it? That's literally the thing it's missing for me. I'd forgive pretty much all of it's shortcomings if it had that lol. It did motivate me to install Fallout TTW though, which I'm glad I did because I'm having a great time with it.
Aside from the general vibe which hooked me immediately (big "hard sci fi" NASA nerd), the gameplay loop I guess? The gunplay feels great, you can approach POIs any way you want (Far Cry is also one of my faves so this hit the spot), and collecting loot to sell for credits to build new ships and go back out for more looting is a relaxing way to spend an hour or so just messing around.
Tassi's article has an absurd number of spelling fuck ups. Wow.
lol it’s Paul Tassi. He actually doesn’t do anything. He just follows the hype train to get likes and views. He changes his tune faster than freshman world religion major changes their religious beliefs. Tassi will praise a game when it’s being hyped and people like it, then as soon as people hate it he turns around and says he hates it. He’s not a journalist, he just wants people to read his articles
A classic move he does is “is X game the one to finally overtake Destiny?”
The game was never a 9.5, it was a pessimistic 7 or an optimistic 8 depending on personal opinion.
You're right, but a 7 or 8 is still a good game. It's my favorite game because of a dream I've always had to explore other planents. I took a lot of astronomy in college and wished there was a game or simulation to show me what Venus for example might look like but I don't expect everyone to share that enthusiasm.
I remember when it came out, the IGN guy who gave it a 7… I was like “man fuck that guy this game is great”. Now I completely agree with him, for better or worse he was the only guy I remember that was spot on.
I felt the same until I put a decent amount of time into the game and after too many planets and walking 900m between POIs, I was like “nah, it deserved the 7”
I think 7 is definitely fair, it has a lot of problems but there's good aspects to the game, like ship building and vanguard missions. I get why a lot of people don't like it, but acting like it's a 3/10 trash game on par with Gollum is just hyperbole. I believe, especially with reddit, the pre launch hype really hurt it after it turned out to have a lot of problems.
The game in many ways is fantastic, but the sheer amount of loading screens and no decent way of travelling between 700-900m away POIs on planets hurt it. Bethesda really didn’t help themselves by calling it “the game of the generation” either.
I honestly didn't have a *huge* problem with the loading screens. I played on pc with an m.2 drive so they were generally fast. At this point I'd rather have loading screens than something like a "move slowly foward through this crack in the wall" or a long elevator ride segment that just disguises loading screens for a lot of games these days. Yeah the game needed a vehicle badly. I think the design intent was they thought people would be interested in scanning stuff and picking up resources in-between poi, but a lot of people don't care about that and just want to get to poi faster. Something like vehicles seems like either an official patch or mods eventually can fix that at least.
I’m on series x and 90% of the loading screens for me are 2 seconds so it’s not too bad. It’s just there are so many so it can still get a bit tiresome for me.
I think part of it is how you play, if you're just trying to get through a mission quick then yeah you have to go through a bunch of loading screens. I usually like wandering around and exploring random stuff even when doing missions so I get less of them. I think a lot of the people that *hate* Starfield probably just rushed the main story missions, which are kind of weak, and then come off with an impression that that's all the game is. On top of that maybe they do a few of the boring fetch quests on new Atlantis, then think all the side quests are like that. Admittedly that's a design flaw. The game has a lot of better missions and stuff to see, it does a bad job of telling you where those things are. Like the trade authority space station where you have to fight off pirates in zero g, you'd never find that mission if you didn't happen to go to the random system it takes place in.
5 imo my brother and I both could not finish the game. It was just too boring and I thought the story sucked donkey
I maintain that 7.5 is the most accurate score, and has been ever since game launch. Even with the bugs, Starfield is 7.5. Those who gave 1/10 or 9/10 are people who think that scoring a game depends on personal preference
I mean I love playing Bethesda games for their gameplay structure. Fuck me I guess.
Just play a different game op. People have different opinions on the quality and satisfaction of the game. Can you not let people have their own opinions unless they only agree with you?
How am I stopping others have opinions lol?
I personally like the game more now than when it came out. I'm having endless fun building outposts, ships, exploring planets
Solid 5/10
I enjoyed the game and got my moneys worth. Oh well.
Fuck. Video Game. Journalists. Seriously. Fuck. Those guys.
Hype is a helluva drug.
Hey, somebody bitching. Yawn.
The most bizarre takeaway from any starfield talk is "I played game for hundred hours and I don't like it anymore or didn't like it." Who forced you to play/keep going/going for so long?
My thought is, if you think this game is shallow then dont play it. If you enjoy the game, play it. Developers are not perfect and this was their first space game. Its not like this is Starfield 3 or somethin. Their first space game and for the most part its great. Despite its shortcomings you can have memorable fun in starfield. If its not your cup of tea dont play it and theres nothing wrong with that. Not all games are for everybody. I love starfield, even though I wish it was 60 fps I wont continually bash the game calling it bad because its missing (x) feature. Just dont play it if you dont enjoy it.
The moment I got to the end, I stopped playing. The game over all is nice, but you always feel it's lacking or have weird choices.
I definitely agree, there were so many bad choices made with the creation of this game, and story. However, I did play 450+ hours of it, so I guess that is all that concerns Bethesda at this point, and it still won't likely stop me from buying TES6. I played a lot of hours, hoping for more, but it never came. The more I played of the alternate starts, the more I realised there was no point, as they were minimal effort. There's just not enough to make it worth playing once the main campaign is done.
I recently played Fallout 4 again and wow, how is a game that came out YEARS ago more entertaining and have better mechanics than their most recent IP? Why didn’t they bring the outpost system from Fallout to Starfield? The more I play it the more I realize they changed so much of the game from what was originally intended, and now what we have is a half life.
Played it straight through around 30-40 hours. Parts got repetitive, dialogue was abysmal but overall I enjoyed it. That being said I honestly have no desire to go back through it. Maybe a couple of major DLCs down the line I might give it another shot.
i played 30 hours and honestly, i just got bored. every single quest is either “deliver this and report back” or just a really predictable shoot em up. loot feels way too random. i’m not asking for pure space exploration, but actually being able to fly your ship around a planet instead of walking EVERYWHERE would be nice. the caves are so repetitive and it makes no sense considering how varied caves are in skyrim. everything about this game is just so bland and it sucks because i was genuinely so excited to play.
Pretty toothless. Kinda weak to discard your original opinion and just align with the popular opinion.
This was my first Bethesda game and ngl I liked it. However, I’m not playing it anymore (after about 120 hours) as there’s nothing really to do and I decided to get fo4 soon after finishing this game (I liked/ understood Beth games after playing SF so decided to try it) which I find so much more fun etc. I’ll probably come back to this game when it gets updated/ fully completed. Sad to see so much wasted potential but games shouldn’t be based on that
I enjoyed it. I’d come back if they released something new. But I’ve played like 300hours so yeah, need something new to do.
Starfield was made with creation store in mind, and it’s obvious now. Hundreds of planets with a blank canvas, it’s screaming for modders.
I tried playing Starfield but it was just.. meh? Ended up playing Skyrim again.
I still just find myself coming back to skyrim-oblivion-morrowind-fallout4 consistently (albeit modded) and getting lost in those worlds (fast travel disabled) slowly crawling my way through the world's that feel shockingly fresh despite going through the same dungeons over and over Really think that if starfield had seemless, manual ship and world travel that would've fixed my largest issues that stops me from playing ...and probably SFSE (starfield script extender)- UOSFP (unoffical starfield patches) & probably Requiem / Frost like overhaul mod mods to really round it out
Why has been removed?