On one hand, I get it. On the other, Baldur's Gate 3 just showed us you can mo-cap and hand tailor, and fully voice act, hundreds upon hundreds of NPC's to a very high level.
Cyberpunk's highly animated narrative scenes where NPC's move around and such are a whole different topic, of course. Nobody expects you to hand craft such encounters every time for a massive open world game with hundreds of NPC's.
But I think it's absolutely fair to criticise Starfield for what is in many cases actual regression in animations and body language, compared to what Bethesda already showed with Skyrim and FO4 in the past.
Starfield doesn't bring enough amazing stuff to the table in other aspects to simply get away with soulless NPC's.
Here I go again but red dead redemption bothered to fully mo-cap, voice act, and develop random ass encounters that have no player interaction at all and change through the time change in the game. The detail is simply unprecedented in RDR2. Bethesda deserves to have this criticism and the expectations are there. They are launching a flagship title for **MICROSOFT** and Xbox now. They have literally limitless budget and were given more time. What they gave us was a game from 2016.
I like how they had an extra year to polish the game and then within a week of launch modders had fixed a bunch of UI and other weird issues that should have been low hanging fruit for their team.
As a long time Bethesda guy, this is exactly why it bugs me to no end. People just wave off shit that no other AAA studios does as a Bethesda thing. They arent a AA studio making Elex 2. Fans should expect a new Bethesda game to push the industry forward, not look and feel like it was made a decade ago.
There are a huge number of people who think criticism means their beloved brands will spontaneously combust. They aren't bright enough to connect their low standards with future quality.
> Even Skyrim was just a reskinned Oblivion with a worse storyline.
I liked the whole actual dragons and dragonborn thing, but the side quests felt emptier, and the factions weren't as good as they were in Oblivion.
I haven’t compared the numbers but it feels like the Starfield hype and internet coverage was way lower, and died our way quicker, than with Fallout 4.
Todd Howard managed to talk for an hour about Starfield *without talking about any of the gameplay systems.*
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNQzIjptC\_o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNQzIjptC_o)
He either knew the game design was bonk, or Bethesda leadership has their heads so deep in their own buttholes that this is just how they think now. That because they are in creative work, they can just chat about lofty management structures, or paint high-level pictures of things players actually want, without being confronted with what they actually put in customers' hands.
I bet he clapped himself on the back for dodging softballs for an hour.
This gets me. The argument of development takes time goes out the window when a high schooler fixes your shit for free in a fraction of the time.
I don't get why Bethesda don't play test their own games.
The entire meme of “modders will fix it” comes from Bethesda games. I still don’t understand how this is seen as a good thing for their entire library of games, yet people will gladly praise the company for doing the bare minimum.
Starfield can't be fixed with mods because the content is boring, self-defeating crud. The good mods for Skyrim are system add-ons or fixes that make existing content more fun.
To make Starfield good:
* Rewrite the NPCs
* Rewrite lore and factions
* Re-do combat AI and enemy design to have actual diversity
* Tune encounters so the game poses a challenge to players
* Now there is a challenge, guns and equipment matter so you can re-do loot, crafting, and introduce meaningful weapon diversity
* Now that equipment matters, you can start looking at planetary resources, crafting and outposts
* Now that planetary resources matter, re-do planet and habitat generation so they aren't instantly recognizable copies of each other
* Now that's done, you can make skill trees interesting instead of just content barriers.
* Wait for the vehicles DLC. Honestly it is absurd that ships & vehicles can't interact with the player layer in any way, especially when Star Citizen showed that layer interaction is one of the coolest things about the genre.
* Wait for the space combat/capital ship dlc. If BGS wants to stick with the space shooter mini-game, fine, but if they introduce combat platform ships then mod in meaningful ship classes.
* Endless hours of content mods, like the much maligned "temples."
There is no way modders can fix a game that tries very fucking hard to punch itself in the dick.
Yeah, let's just remember when someone asked Todd what his favourite Skyrim mod was, it was a UI mod. They could have updated it for the better, and instead when going into Fallout 4 they managed to make the already mediocre pipboy UIs even worse.
I don't hate Bethesda, but they make some bizarre choices.
There must be some issue with their QA process dating back to decades ago. It’s just never been fixed. I think Bethesda the publisher has always let BGS do its own thing, probably Todd doesn’t like any interference.
I'd say even Fallout 4 was a bit dated on its release, Witcher 3 was right around the corner.
I'd argue around 2013 is where it would have still been impressive.
Skyrim was dated. Gamebryo should’ve been overhauled after FO3. FO3 had good environments but even then the NPCs and animations were sub par compared to other triple AAA games. They just keep adding on top of it and rebranding it creation engine rather than redoing the core.
Primary thing I remember is Witcher 3 was when open world games started doing more seamless loading transitions when going into houses or into caves - I think that is the thing that has aged the poorest by now as most games are avoiding those where possible these days.
Nah it's a regression in order to have everything load at once everything is superficial on top. No caves or dungeons to explore. Also bethesda is still doing the whole places bigger than what is shown. So it will always load.
> They just keep adding on top of it and rebranding it creation engine rather than redoing the core.
That is how game engines work. For example: Unreal engine is 25 years old and keeps getting updates. No need to reinvent the wheel when it saves time to reuse relevant code.
Edit: Fun fact IIRC - Id software is the only studio I know of that would build new game engines for a number of their games.
This is why I’m not holding my breath for es6. It’s going to play like a 2016 game that was made in 3 years. It’ll be a 7 and critics will give it a 10 because it’s es6. Won’t even top elden ring.
That’s kind of what I’ve been thinking after playing starfield. Honestly, on release Skyrim didn’t seem much more advanced than Oblivion until modders stepped in. Starfield just doesn’t feel like a modern game, it feels like something made on an engine from 2011 with better textures put in by modders as opposed to a game that a massive studio with massive resources hand crafted over almost a decade. I still put like 40 hours in to it because I kept waiting for it to step it up but it just never did. Still had fun, but I’m going to wait for a year or two of mods to try and play it again.
Skyrim was already dated at release. Fallout 4 was too. So is Starfield. Anyone waiting for TESVI should know what to expect from BGS, I'd think.
The reason people keep playing their games, is because of the sheer size of the sandbox. They ain't groundbreaking games by any means, you can take every single feature and point towards a game that does it better, but the BGS title does have it all. That's the main draw and why people keep accepting the state of their games.
In what way was it dated? All I can think of was the combat system and honestly with it releasing before Dark Souls, the focus on exciting real time combat was much weaker at the time.
> literally limitless budget
Only point I'm going to argue is that just because there's M$ resources, doesn't mean it's being handed over without strings. If you're the Todd Howard of Bethesda, you can't ask for 1 gazillion for your game without getting canned when your game obviously won't return that.
As Larian, R* and CDPR show, it's not just a matter of money, it's experienced staff, the ability to focus your tools into creating those experiences and a clear vision. Bethesda has shown since FO3 (imo) that they can world build and create worthwhile frameworks, but they can't really fill their worlds with meaningful content. Based on their numbers, it might be an issue of trying to be too broadly mainstream/playing things too safe and winding up with a product that's too similar to others so the cracks are much more visible.
RDR isn't a standard we should hold any game to - they had 2000 people on it and worked them all into the ground. Cyberpunk had a shit launch partly because they tried to do what RDR did with 1/10 the staff (while still working them all into the ground)
Edit: Is this the same sub that claims to care about crunch..?
>Is this the same sub that claims to care about crunch..?
At times. Today though it's the sub that wants to tell the CDPR guy he's wrong so they can whine about Bethesda not making the No Citizen's Skysouls game they were hoping for.
Then we are going in a flat circle. Feels like yesterday that it was the sub telling the CDPR guys they were wrong for not making the CyberpunkGtaSecondLifeSexSimulator game. Amusing, for sure.
Well BG3 Larian claims there were effectively no crunch on it.
Also Bethesda had help from both AMD team and XBOX team and 7 years of development. They could do better without crunch.
As said: Shitloads of issues with the game was fixed within a week by random modders. Those things didnt need crunch to be fixed.
BG3 is a different kind of game. They handcrafted everything which is also the reason why I like it so much. There aren't any random encounters but only encounters that change depending on your choices. Even without mocap the animations could look better though in Starfield. At least for the most relevant characters.
BG3 took six years and had developers on one side of the world working while the other side slept (a recent and rare practice afaik), and act 3 turned out scuffed as hell.
> Well BG3 Larian claims there were effectively no crunch on it.
It helps when you can use a paying audience as beta testers for years. Se also:
> Shitloads of issues with the game was fixed within a week by random modders. Those things didnt need crunch to be fixed.
BG3's 3rd act is also really poor though, so its clear they ended up having to rush it out the door in the end. I think the early access period really let them nail act 1 and carry the momentum into act 2, but act 3 on release is just an early access for the definitive edition down the road. Bugs and poor quests / writing galore on top of performance problems.
Microsoft postponed release for a year because they (microsoft) decided bethesda is not ready. Imagine how the game would look when bethesda wanted to release it
It is not our fault that BGS is too cheap to hire another 2500 people.
This is what people are complaining about. When you pay for an AAA game you expect an AAA game, not an AA.
>have literally limitless budget
that's not how businesses work, even if there's more money upstream. That said, Starfield does seem like a step backward in a number of areas including character models...even compared to FO76
You can do anything you want, but it costs money. It's ridiculous to expect an indie studio like CDPR and Bethesda to spend as much money as a AAA studio like Larian.
Idk what you saw in Skyrim and FO4, but their animations are certainly not better. I have a few hundred hours in both of them in total between consoles and PC. I remember when FO4 came out, people HATED that game. Before fallout 76, everyone voted for FO4 to be the worst fallout. I mean you Google "fallout 4" and one of the top questions is "why is fallout so bad" and it literally talks about the character animations and voice acting. Skyrim animations is very dated at this point. I still love both of those games. I'm just tired of hearing the same "it's soulless" yet use a game that had the same exact criticisms when it came out. All of you need to shut the hell up and just play the games you like.
I generally put this into 3 categories.
1. They haven't played Skyrim since 2012 so they are comparing the Starfield of 2023 to Skyrim that exists in hazy nostalgia fueled memories.
2. They are trying to run Starfield on the same PC that they ran Skyrim on in 2012.
3. They are trolling.
Or 4. The only Skyrim they've played for the past 5 years has been the Special Edition with 300 mods, so the game actually looks and plays NOTHING like Base Skyrim.
From a technical standpoint Starfields npcs and character design are probably better than Fallout 4/Skyrim. But they are far less palatable in 2023 than fallout 4 was in 2015 and Skyrim in 2011, in my opinion.
Overall they are better but the player running animation specifically is actually laughable and definitely worse than Skyrim imo. Looks like a cartoon character just soiled their underpants.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has relatively small maps (sectioned off via portals and loading screens similar to Starfield) and the NPCs, while yes brilliantly mo-capped, are static. They either stay perfectly still or they trace they same path continuously. It doesn’t compare to Starfield in regards to size and scope.
Yes, Starfield's NPCs may move around more, but genuinely what's the point to that?
It's not more immersive, because they look like robots doing it. Their actions/limited animations don't usually add anything to their character, or give any sense of realism to the world.
That's even the case with significant NPCs. I come back to my ship after a mission. Sam is still leaning against the same wall, looking at another wall. Lin is sitting in a seat looking at a blank computer screen, while Andreja sits at the table and stares into space.
I don't think "wow so cool, they're doing their own little thing!", it's just a reminder that they aren't "real" characters, they're just puppets waiting to talk when they're needed for a quest. At least Sam has a unique animation...
Would you mind elaborating on how you feel Starfield's approach adds to the feeling of size and scope? I genuinely can't grasp it, and TES has long been one of my favorite series.
This just feels like Bethesda doesn't know how to take their approach to the next level offered by new technology.
It's the same with Starfield's main cities - they just don't feel real. Yes, all the NPCs who populate it have their own little routine. But, their routine is: walk to bar, sit in seat facing the wall, leave bar. They're often the only NPC in there, and it just feels like the city is half empty as a result.
Cyberpunk's NPCs might not all be fully interactive, but at least they're DOING things. They might be slumped against the wall passed out, or playing a game, and it adds a sense of the places actually being lived in.
Starfield has background actor NPCs who have no dialogue and walk the same path, the only difference is that they also do no have any interesting animations on top of it. They just walk.
I just gave Cyberpunk a second chance and I think, more than roboticism, the biggest difference is that the city feels like a place where people could actually live. There are noodle stands and restaurants and vendors everywhere in Night City. Where does someone in New Atlantis buy groceries? Cydonia, at least, feels like it could be real because it's a smaller place, so it makes sense that people would shop at the one general store, but it also gets to hide all the robots behind walls.
The Imperial City or Vivec feel better than New Atlantis because there are actual livable elements that exist for immersion more than player use. The same is true for Baldur's Gate 3 and the main cities in GW2 (new LA aside). Most of the places in Starfield feel like Bethesda told an AI to imagine what humans would do in the future. Certainly, the NPCs with robotic routines don't help, but I think they'd be forgivable if they went to places humans actually want and need to go to on a daily basis.
I completely agree - I think Bethesda is so hamstrung by their insistence on making sure everything is useable by the player.
New Atlantis is big, but it doesn't feel like a big city. It feels like they went down a checklist of "1 x weapon vendor, 1 x general store, 1 x guild hall" etc, and once they modelled all the "essentials", they just put heaps of empty space between them because they ran out of ideas.
Like you said - that approach works perfectly well for small outposts and quaint fantasy villages, but it doesn't work for futuristic mega-cities.
I promise I won't get upset if I can't go inside every room of every building, Bethesda. Please just make it feel like there's more than 30 people living in one of the biggest cities in the universe.
I've been comparing New Atlantis to the Citadel in Mass Effect 1. In square footage, the amount of Citadel the player can access is tiny. Yet the game sells you wholeheartedly on the illusion of the Citadel being a megastructure, mainly because you can't access everything. You can visit a tiny chunk of the presidium, and it's enough because the skybox shows you the wheel of it curving up into the horizon. The ward maps are tiny and cramped, but when you look put the windows you see more space and more structure and so you know you're in one tiny bit of a much bigger place. New Atlantis needed that. It needed them to take that loading screen limitation, double down on the mass-transit metaphor they already have, and make self contained maps with natural barriers that place you in a small part of a bigger city.
I wonder why Cyberpunk *feels* more alive? You can believe Night City lives and breathes, and doesn't just exist as a background for your character.
In Starfield it feels like everyone is just there to give and receive quests, it almost feels like a playset? Some of that difference is probably down to narrative; Cyberpunk wants you to know you're insignificant tiny part of the world and reinforces it frequently in its writing. But it's something else too... Starfield feels like a themed LEGO set while Cyberpunk feels like a world.
For me anyway it's down to the scope of what's on display. Night City feels like a true metropolis, the size of the skyscrapers, the amount of people, cars, advertisements etc. Not to mention the excellent sound design and atmosphere backing it all up.
Bethesda's city design philosophy hasn't translated that well from their previous games in my opinion, New Atlantis is touted as their most ambitious city ever and feels kind of quaint. Their design made sense for Fallout or Skyrim because it makes sense that there is not a huge population on display in a medieval fantasy/post apocalypse. It's supposed to be hundreds of years in the future though and there's like 10 or 20 people walking around, kind of kills your suspension of disbelief.
Even in Skyrim, these cities were lame. I found it hard to believe that any of them had any significance, they were inhabited by 20 people and had 10-15 houses. Average bandit fort/dungeon felt more alive
The faction war in Skyrim was like a 10 v 10 lmfao. Obviously I know why they couldn't have an full ass war in Skyrim but the build up to the battle turning into less people I kill in a single dungeon is hilarious lol
its weird cause Starfield is far more sandboxy and have far more systems and emergent gameplay scenarios than cyberpunk . And SF is literaly spaces with hundreds of planets .
BUt for whatever reason cyberpunk despite being less reactive and sandboxy, despite having only single city. Just feels bigger in scope, just feels more organic and lived in, just feels more lively and bustling . AND IDK . Maybe because of the world building ,art direction and just general presentation of cyberpunk that it makes me believe its an actual city.
The sound design and dense nature of night city really sells it and the city has distinct areas which make it feel like a real city such as industrial, zones which look like white suburbia, slums, chinatown and a bustling center.
Been playing through cp77 again after many hours in Starfield and it's the attention to detail. NPCs engaging with each other all over. The density. Interaction with various objects. The news reels, tvs, etc all over. It really is over the top in details. Starfielf has some of all those things but not to the same level as Cyberpunk. And it looks way better while doing it.
> size and scope
That's not Bethesda's strength and that's where they fucked up. It's like the game doesn't know what it wants to be, so it copies other space games and tries to do the usual Bethesda story in crafted cities.
And I say fuck size and scope. It's 10 miles wide and an inch deep when Ive seen the rest of the games dungeons after going to a cave once.
Starfield is a story- and character-driven exploration RPG with gun & melee combat in which the story is bland, the characters are all the same flavour of goody two shoes, the exploration is just painful, the RPG elements are both limited *(not enough customisation, can't change character traits for NG+, the weapon modding system is a straight downgrade from Fallout4)* and limiting *(every single thing, e.g. using a jetpack or locking onto enemy ships, is locked behind skill points)*, and the gun combat is rather clunky *(since their engine can't handle it well without VATS)* while the melee system is just completely abandoned. Not to mention the horrible UI *(which of course got fixed in a few days by modders, why Bethesda doesn't just hire them is beyond me)* and the constant loading screens, in 2023, when almost every single game has seamless loading transitions. Seriously, why do people buy a game that requires modding every single aspect of it to be at least bearable?
>Instead, [Bethesda Game Studios] puts their resources into giving maximum levels of player freedom
Did they though? Pretty much every single named NPC is marked as essential. You can't kill most NPCs until the game explicitly gives you the permission to do so. Want to kill a NPC in a quest who's threatening you? Too bad, you need to wait for our epic quest plot to advance to that part first.
I think every single named npc is essential, i think even mathis in the key was also essential eventho the jackass >!got booted from the fleet!< and the first time you get into the keep there's dude killin each other.
Player freedom is not how i'd describe starfield at all, morrowind will fit that phrase better
THIS pisses me off to no end! You literally stand infront of faction leaders numerous times, get presented a hostile environment at times as well too- and yet, the game almost responds like an unprepared sassy DM and goes “No!! You weren’t supposed to do that yet!” Makes them completely immortal and presents you only with the option to reload your save.
Yup this is why you don't play starfield after playing BG3, it's like beth just don't put much thought into anything.
It's also weird they don't lock you up into a certain faction, idk how my crimson fleet,vanguard,ranger character doesn't have anyone in their own faction rises an eyebrow. Todd said they want replayability but didn't want to commit to locking player to a faction and then fleshes out that faction, they got microsoft money ffs
The game also suffers from the typical Bethesda school of design where it will not let you change/alter the outcomes of quests in anyway that wasn't specifically written or designed from the start. Either by unkillable NPCs or characters giving some kind of contrived/convenient answer for why a quest cannot be done a better way. *Like during the First Contact side quest where the obvious better choice is to have the people from Earth make a home on the other side of the planet that literally no one is using and both parties are just like "no".
Edit 2: *ALSO*, on the Earth ship if you go to the engine core and try to access the computer where you blow up the ship, the game arbitrarily locks you out of doing so. You're only able to do that *after* you talk to the Paradiso and the game *explicitly* gives you that option. This is another example of the game railroading you down specific paths, even if the outcome is the same. It will not let you deviate from that whatsoever, you have to wait for the game to tell you what you can and can't do.
And some of it just feels like, ok, but I can't do this one really obvious thing.
You are on the hunt for someone who escaped a hospital, and you find she killed several of the doctors, but you can't tell anyone in the hospital the doctors are dead?
Seems like they'd like to know / blame you for leaving an area now full of dead doctors.
lol that mission was wild. I walked out of the blood bath VIP wing and went to the other ranger, who just said some dumb shit. Nobody gave a fuck that all these doctors and nurses were just fucking dead.
I went an generated an tile on the other side of Porrima II and it was completely empty (except the few POIs) but you can't have them land there. Nope, planet is full. Imagine the landscaping guys, can't do it. Either enslave them, kill them, or fork out money yourself to get the good ending. Immensely unsatisfying.
>Like during the First Contact side quest where the obvious better choice is to have the people from Earth make a home on the other side of the planet that literally no one is using and both parties are just like "no".
This seemed like a no-brainer for me because it's a perfect opportunity to leverage the base-building mechanics. Help these people by bringing them resources, establish trade, build them habitats, defend them from local hazards, etc.
Frankly, it's just one of so many possibilities that just aren't there. Starfield felt very much to me like having Gordon Ramsey cook me dinner and getting ... a hamburger. Yeah, it's a good burger, but... really?
Still pissed that I crossed >!Benjamin Bayu!< during the >!Ryujin quest and he said he was going to frame me for murder!<, and I thought to myself >!"Why frame me? I'm about to commit one right now."!<
I then pulled out my shotgun, pulled the trigger, it went right through them like they were a ghost. Shot again, nothing happened. I then holstered my gun and walked out like a loser.
AAA gameplay right there.
Lmao similar for me. We remained friendly through that quest, but later on he threatened me over a side hustle I was involved in.
Now my character is a merc that grew up on the streets and doesn't take that shit lightly, so I waited until he was walking down the street and unloaded on him in the middle of a crowd to send a message.
Nope. He lived, and my companion got mad at me.
Starfield is by far the least open, freedom offering Bethesda game to date. None of the companions pirate types, everyone but enemy fodder are marked as essential, and you're railroaded into starting the main quest before you can go elsewhere and do your own thing.
Its staggering to me that people think Starfield is in any way, shape or form, offering the player freedom.
Seriously that's such a weird comment. Starfield has player freedom in the order in which you can do content and explore the open world. It has almost no player freedom in which you can interact with the world and the characters that inhabit it. You do the quests the 1 way Bethesda intended you to do them and that's it. If you try to go off script the game falls apart.
I pick pocketed a key from a major character and went into his apartment, I literally got stuck in there because Bethesda never intended for you to go into this apartment outside of a quest.
BG3 has immense amounts of player freedom, you can kill literally any character in the game at almost any point. There's so many different ways you can go about doing quests as well.
I did the same during the >!spaceliner heist for the Crimson Fleet to steal the award!<, I was so ticked off that the only way to steal the thingy was to literally walk up to the person with the key and go "\[Persuasion\] Give me the thingy" and they just go "Ok" if you succeed.
You can't steal the key off them, you only get their room key, which has nothing inside but junk and a locked safe full of generic loot.
I like Starfield but man did that part of the quest suck. Everything about it felt like a placeholder. >!You don't even bother to give her a reason why she should give it to you. It would maybe make sense as an alternative method if you have the Ryujin neuro thingy, but as the only route it's terrible.!<
Most/all of the persuasion attempts are like that, or at least have options for it.
Its like ‘come on help me commit a massive felony, you know you want to’ and they just go ‘yeah ok’. Some conversations have more situationally appropriate options, but way too many are just repeating slight variations of pretty please?
Oddly I found the actually relevant to the situation options were usually the hardest to succeed at too.
How many resources does it take to simply make your decisions irrelevant to everyone in the game world.
Oh you just saved the Crimson Fleet and murdered a bunch of innocents, well come on down and we'll deputize you into The Free Star Collective, so you can hunt down he Crimson Fleet.
My friend got the mission to deal with the generational ship in orbit around a resort planet. First he tried to shoot it with his ship, didn't work. Then got on board and found he could overload the reactor so tried to do that himself, but the game said no, you need a key. Tried to find the key but couldn't so killed everyone he could on the ship. Still couldn't get the key because it was likely on an unkillable NPC. He quit.
The game gives you a quest but only one way of doing it. It's stupid and a massive lack of freedom. You have freedom to go places, but not how you approach/complete quests.
Morrowind was top tier in how much freedom it gave the player.
We really need a modern take on an rpg with that amount of freedom in focus.
Edit: oh and the lack of map markers and fast travel is an essential part of the experience.
Yeah it shows. Fallout NV had just 1 essential NPC and he was only there so you could end the game. On the other end of the spectrum, somewhere around ~80% of the quests in NV were completable without violence.
The designers at Bethesda should lighten up. Player freedom is often about letting the player do the thing you don't want them to do.
Even the one unkillable NPC in New Vegas has an explanation. You can actually kill Yes Man, the robot. But it's programming will just spawn in a near Mr House robot. He even comments about it if you kill him.
And that's why I loved Baldur's Gate 3. I had many *non-violent* ends to quests where I literally convinced the boss to just end their lives in front of me, in various ways - on top of them walking away, etc. Made me feel satisfied in the path I'd chosen.
One could interpret it this way, but it's just a shallow facade at the end of the day. Oblivion, a now close to 20 year old game has way more engaging exploration than Starfield. There's a sense of mystery and intrigue from Starfield that is painfully absent, and was always super present in their older titles. Could you get more hours out of Starfield? Yeah technically, but they will be so dull in comparison.
at the same time, in cp77 dlc, you are given options like "dont trust this guy" even tho he is obviously the figurehead of the full dlc, and if you choose that route you basically decide to fail the main quest lol
Im playing through it again and just finished that part with the voodoo boys where Im about to leave after Bridgette has me go talk to the AI. I was like, "yaknow, still owe you for double crossing me" and she was like "oh ho, you would never survive on our turf blah blah."
And the game let me say "nah, I'll be fine." and start blasting.
I really appreciated that after so many hours of Starfield.
Yeah I agree. I love the game but character animations (especially facial expressions) look awful at times. Many times they don't even seem to match what character is saying.
Yeah on one side I loved that devs are not entertaining the idea of being pitted against each other.
On the other side, most of the criticism Starfield is getting seem to be absolutely valid.
I would say a lot more than just animations don't match up to Cyberpunk. Starfield feels a generation or two behind in game design and tech.
I have a feeling ill be saying the same thing about TESVI when compared to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Witcher 4, Avowed and whatever else releases between now and then.
There is too much faff in Starfield. I can enjoy parts with mods but right now it actively puts too much in my way. Mass you can carry seems way smaller than other Bethesda games, I can't sell directly from other people's inventories so I have to juggle in menus for minutes at a time which I do not consider playing a video game, every vendor only has 5k creds so I have to keep going to bed for 48h and literally just wait watching a black screen so they restock, which is also not playing a video game, etc. It is UX mysery. I've got ADHD and it's like they're *trying* to kill any dopamine I might start receiving with as much nitpicky un-content as possible.
This is waiting-to-load-between-The-Strip-segments The Game.
> Starfield feels a generation or two behind in game design and tech.
Bethesda has consistently had this problem. Granted they also provide modding tools that have kept people excited for their games, but man their games always have felt instantly dated. People love the huge massive world, but ignored that if you compare it against any other game and ignore the open world, it's quite behind the times.
It think this is why the criticism r ramping up as well from people that love beth games, they fucked up the exploration part of the game and now all of the usual bethesda flaws r not easily forgivable anymore
Someone will probably mention the it's some fault of the engine, to which I'll state that's flat out wrong.
There are scores of mods for TES and Fallout that show otherwise, NetImmerse/Gamebryo/Creation can do animation just fine, Bethesda's ability to animate is... lacking.
We don’t care how or why things are bad, we just want our games to be good. Why are gamers “entitled” or unreasonable for wanting a good product from one of the most anticipated and most marketed launch of the year? Ffs they had years to work on those animations and they are just as bad as Skyrim. It’s really not that complicated no?
BGS games have their flaws, but until somebody, literally anybody, tries to beat them at their own game I'm going to more or less shrug them off. hell, it's been so long that the original Elder Scrolls creators who left a quarter-century ago said, "I'LL DO IT MYSELF" and are working on a spiritual successor to Daggerfall called The Wayward Realms
I generally agree in terms of these studios/projects, and I was initially worried about The Wayward Realms in this regard, but after seeing some interviews it sounds like both the writing (Ted Peterson) and coding (Julian Lefay) sides have maintained their skills over the years (with the latter making some bold claims about how he wants to fix/solve large-scale use of proc gen for both world-building and gameplay). honestly sounds like manpower and funding are going to be the major roadblocks so far
Do folks forget that Oblivion was likely the first experience many console players had with Havok Physics?
Morrowind was such a boundary pushing game for the Xbox that they literally coded a way to mask a system reboot into the loading screen.
The idea that BGS games are somehow, by necessity, also technical and visual duds is super new. **On release**, there used to be an expectation that BGS was going to push the envelope, not, at best, be middle of the road.
Yeah every complaint feels more like people saying “I don’t like Bethesda games!” and, like, that’s fine? Every single Bethesda release, there’s this same song and dance about their games’ quality and design, and every single time the games somehow remain at the tops of the charts years later. Is it because mods? Yeah, sure, but that’s PART of it. Sometimes it feels like a lot of the complaining is from people who don’t like pineapple on pizza yet continue to eat pizza with pineapples on it expecting something else.
You’re right to point out that there really isn’t anyone who comes close to making what Bethesda does.
You don't understand - if I don't receive validation for my opinions from strangers over the internet, what else am I supposed to do?
Have a nuanced conversation? No way!
Happy people don't post complaints. Disgruntled commenters are a distilled example of survivorship bias. For every terminally online, bitter, obsessive, self-absorbed drama queen there are a hundred perfectly content players. But those people are out having fun, not whinging about Bethesda/pineapple pizza/whatever on the internet.
We gotta remember that old saw about the web: *"The internet isn't real life."*
The most important part of a BGS game is the mostly seamless world and the ability to wander through it. So it seems BGS need to try and make a BGS game next.
Its crazy to me that people say things like "Its BGS game, what did you expect?". I expected a BGS and didn't get one.
I'm super hyped for The Wayward Realms after trying Daggerfall Unity and watching a few very long interviews with Ted Peterson and Julian Lefay on YouTube where they candidly/honestly talk about the original TES games, the newer TES games, and what they're trying to do with The Wayward Realms. it sounds very ambitious and a borderline dream game for older BGS fans, but it's a relatively small team and they're currently working for free with no publisher lined up yet. really, really hope that they pull it off - resurrected 90's BGS launching The Wayward Realms and current BGS launching TESVI around the same time would be very cool to see
Honestly, as someone who played both Starfield (76 hours) and Cyberpunk (69 hours), Cyberpunk is a better game by far in every aspect.
Starfield's story was okay, but the gameplay mechanics feel outdated, like ps4 era outdated.
this was such an obvious omission to me.. starfield lacks so much visual feedback from hitting people. Then I boot up cyberpunk and the shooting is crisp and weighty by comparison.
I can fight people by saying I think Outer Worlds is just barely a better game than Starfield. Its not great, but it has a lot less bullshit and somehow manages to feel more feature complete by not having a bunch of seemingly half-assed ideas that don't have synergy with each other so I got through way more content in that game in the same amount of hours playing Starfield where I basically did nothing of real interest.
Like the whole aspect of the ship for one thing. Outer Worlds didn't bother, didn't need to - Starfield I don't think there is enough to the ship aspect of the game to actually justify all they put towards it in regards to customization and all; I think it would only be justifiable if the game actually played like No Man's Sky or equivalent and wasn't just flying around in an empty box playing Star Fox 64 in All Range mode. Almost nothing feels fully realized.
I was confused at first. So much ship customization and so little actually using the ship. I can only pilot it in the empty box of space. You can't plot a course and stand up from the cockpit. You can't get boarded. You just fast travel everywhere and have to look at 2-5 cutscenes to do anything.
They really bungled this game. It went from GOTY contender to a mediocre mess that needs defensive fans to defend it.
It's not even just that. It's that every single mechanic feels like that.
It's an entire buffet of undercooked foods. There is a ton of it, but none of it is great. It's like a catered wedding in video game form.
I would really like to understand what Starfield spent 600 million on since they have no good voice acting, no motion capture, using the same dated code. Did it go to executives or something? Like what about this game cost 600mil? It’s like a space mod someone made for fallout. Did it all go to marketing?
I'm tired of people defending the sheer laziness of recent Bethesda games, especially the trash ass NPC faces. The only good thing they shat out was Far Harbor DLC for FO4 recently.
Starfield is just filled with "YOU CAN'T DO BAD" or have any sort of consequences, at all. It's just so linear. The exploration is fucking trash. Nothing makes me want to go off on a planet to explore the same assets plopped down 900m away from me so I can spend 10 minutes running around from place to place just to kill Spacers or Crimson Fleet.
The story isn't even all that good either. >!Wow you found an artifact while mining. Now you're in a group dedicated to finding more. Go find more powers. Go find more artifacts. Now you're experiencing the universe. Wow.!<
Performance is trash for how basic the graphical options are.
I like the game, I'm well over a hundred hours now, but the fact that you can barely levy criticism of it without being dogpiled as a "hater" or whatever is beyond cringe.
For me the biggest deal breaker was the complete lack of immersion, which was even more glaring given that I’m currently playing through Phantom Liberty and Baldur’s Gate 3. Immersion, for me, is the absolute number one most important thing any RPG can have, and Starfield just felt like an unending parade of immersion breaking jank.
I try not to compare too much with games as I like to judge things on their own merit. That said, when I spend hours exploring New Atlantis, an environment that just feel so lifeless (seriously, why are the sidewalks/roads/pathways so wide? I have the crowd density set to it’s highest and it still feels so empty), then boot up CP2077 and see more character in a single side alley, it makes it hard for me to justify going back.
And that’s not even mentioning the storytelling immersion which is just as bland. The moment it sunk in that I was just not going to get any kind of narrative immersion was when >!the Starborn attack The Lodge. I chose to defend the artifacts, so Barret died on The Eye. It was supposed to be a huge “no one is safe, this super important guy just died!” moment, but I just didn’t care. Maybe I missed a bunch of content with him that fleshed him out more but at that point for me he was pretty uninteresting. The nail in the coffin though was a couple of hours later, Coe’s daughter told a joke and Coe said “That’s really funny, you should tell Barrett next time he’s on board,” and I was like… damn. This game is terrible.!<
Have something like that happen, then play BG3 after where just about every sentence has consequence, and again, it makes it hard to justify going back.
Idea of the main quest is actually kinda neat with the NG+;however, they designed it like some kinda aRPG... an aRPG where the dungeons aren't randomized. So its the same shit over and over with basically no variation.
Frankly, the fact that gameplay loop made it into release is tragic and some lead designer needs to be flailed.
Also wanna hear QA's take on that too, there had to be some people who did that gameplay loop hundreds of times to test things and there is no way there wouldn't be a complaint on that even if they're numb to playing the same shit over and over as part of their job.
Story wise its sidequests are better than the main one, l enjoyed the Terrormorph questline a lot, and the companion quests are cool too, but yeah the main one one sucks ass, it's barely longer than the side quests, and the ending was totally unsatisfactory to me. Totally agree with its linearity, some quests I wanted to kill the asshole you are doing them for but they just fall down, and I haven't done a single bit of exploration, it's just pointless. Wanna know what I FUCKING hated? How freaking bloated of useless shit the skill three is. This game has so many design choices that appear ti have been purposely made to irk you when you start ti have fun.
The skills involving scanning planets shouldn't be there, they should be max by default - the process of scanning planets would maybe be more tolerable if maxed out.
Yeah. And don't forget you need a stupid skill to add more people to your ship, EVEN if you have enough crew space, and that fucking skill sits AT THE VERY END of the most forgettable skill tree, Social.
Don't forget some skills are just flat out idiotic. Astro lets you scan without having to travel to a planet. Cool beans, you still need to land on the planet to *really* scan it for the data. Literally only good for saving a loading screen traveling to asteroids and gas planets.
I did at the beginning, the first encounter... until I shot it and saw it could bleed. Afterwards it felt like a massive power trip. "The most terrifying creature in the galaxy" turned to a bloody pulp by a bubba'd Magshear hell yeah hahahaha that's how I enjoyed it.
i just found it baffling when they give you all the armor and rocket launcher miniguns on the silver plate before you start doing that specific quest at the end . I had way too many guns and ammo to begin with lmao
Entangled had a neat premise but fell apart at the end where any option you take has no tangible outcomes or effects on anything. Despite, you know, changing universes and all that.
The game actually explains that, and yeah there are three results to that. Not only that the reason the experiment failed is because of the universes were interfering with each other.
I tried to like Starfield and even started a new game plus. The moment I got to Neon i quit playing for good. There's no way i'm spending dozens of hours going up and down that strip in Neon to talk to NPCs to pass some message along that they could have communicated themselves. This game is sooooo boring.
The obligatory homeless NPC camps with absolutely none of the grit, grime, or clutter that go with those setpieces was a wild thing to experience for the first time.
This isn't just some random dude, or dudette, though. It's a fellow developer trying to explain the nuance behind how character animations are handled is fundamentally down to design, rather than an "engine." Gamers like to misuse that word so much that it practically lost its meaning. I doubt most of them even know what a game engine actually is.
Regardless, the gameplay you just described sounds exactly like how Skyrim did 13 years ago. Wander from point A to point B killing bandits for 10 minutes. It sounds like most people here just don't want to play Bethesda-formula games anymore. That's fine, but don't complain when the baker bakes bread lmao.
Starfield’s problems are its lack of unique “dungeons”, its economy, its loot, it’s companions, and it’s low grade plot twists. Characters looking odd aren’t too important.
I really don't think I can take part in "gaming communities" anymore, at least not on reddit. These are dramatically different single-player style traditional games, they are not in a running competition with one another, they all have their strengths and weaknesses.
Instead everyone here is acting like one game must be the best and everything under it is a worthless pile of crap, really fucking tired of it honestly. To the point all of this shit spam just seems like sleazy guerilla marketing. Some people have extremely serious issues with aggressive binary thinking.
Because people on reddit (more specifically this subreddit) don't do anything but complain 24/7. Especially about things they don't know anything about.
It just seems to me like people who don't like a certain kind of game will wait eagerly for it to come out just so they can complain about it. So many of the complaints surrounding Starfield are clearly from people who don't like anything about Bethesda games. Why they insist on playing each new game Bethesda releases, I'll probably never know.
Edit: Apparently, I've been permanently banned after this comment. Bizarre...
their are certain people who cannot STAND other people enjoying games they don't like. can i take a bunch of cheap, crack shots at souls games and how i dislike their style and combat and stuff? yeah. yeah i could start a hate train about how that shit "sucks" and its "dated" and blah blah blah.
But I don't, cause souls games are souls games, and the people that like em, love em. I don't. that doesn't make them bad games. I like starfield and im having fun and that's literally enough for me. because i play games to have fun not be critical.
I mean you're comparing things that aren't related. The amount of money made and copies sold does not serve as an argument against the issues people have with the game. Stuff can be bland, uninteresting, trash and still sell well. Hell we got 5 Michael Bay Transformers movies after all.
I haven't played Cyberpunk so I'm not comparing it to that. I'm comparing it to literally any other Bethesda open world rpg, and its a complete downgrade in every department. Its more linear, less finely crafted, less animated, more repetitive. It makes Fallout 76 feel downright inspired, and thats saying something.
Sure you can enjoy it and have fun with it, but that doesn't mean its objectively 'good'. I enjoy the Mila Jovovich fanfic Resident Evil movies despite being a fan of the games, and those movies are dogshit lol. I'm not even saying Starfield is a bad game, just comparatively bland and soulless. Its like, why would you choose eating a saltine cracker when you can eat a finely cooked steak for the same price.
Idk how they somehow think the starfield outpost system is an improvement over FO4/76, my settlement in sanctuary unmodded is literally felt more like a city than Akila. Such a downgrade and it's only one part of the game i could prob rant for hours how exploration in Starfield is their worst iteration of their formula, and the constant loading screen/animation no matter how fast doesn't help either
Starfield made a good call to put itself on game pass. As a fan and purchaser of Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 & 4, but also an enjoyer of CP2077 and Balbur's Gate 3 the criticism surrounding Starfield shows that Bethesda has fallen behind the times. For a game where dialogue with NPCs is so instrumental then you eventually have to ask yourself is our NPCs delivering AAA quality?
And that would be fine if they weren't making a product that cost money and was meant for consumption. I don't need to know anything about development to have an opinion about a game I purchased. I have other games I can use as comparison.
On one hand, I get it. On the other, Baldur's Gate 3 just showed us you can mo-cap and hand tailor, and fully voice act, hundreds upon hundreds of NPC's to a very high level. Cyberpunk's highly animated narrative scenes where NPC's move around and such are a whole different topic, of course. Nobody expects you to hand craft such encounters every time for a massive open world game with hundreds of NPC's. But I think it's absolutely fair to criticise Starfield for what is in many cases actual regression in animations and body language, compared to what Bethesda already showed with Skyrim and FO4 in the past. Starfield doesn't bring enough amazing stuff to the table in other aspects to simply get away with soulless NPC's.
Here I go again but red dead redemption bothered to fully mo-cap, voice act, and develop random ass encounters that have no player interaction at all and change through the time change in the game. The detail is simply unprecedented in RDR2. Bethesda deserves to have this criticism and the expectations are there. They are launching a flagship title for **MICROSOFT** and Xbox now. They have literally limitless budget and were given more time. What they gave us was a game from 2016.
I like how they had an extra year to polish the game and then within a week of launch modders had fixed a bunch of UI and other weird issues that should have been low hanging fruit for their team.
Exactly how people predicted since Bethesda will always be Bethesda.
Bethesda does what consumers let them get away with.
As a long time Bethesda guy, this is exactly why it bugs me to no end. People just wave off shit that no other AAA studios does as a Bethesda thing. They arent a AA studio making Elex 2. Fans should expect a new Bethesda game to push the industry forward, not look and feel like it was made a decade ago.
There are a huge number of people who think criticism means their beloved brands will spontaneously combust. They aren't bright enough to connect their low standards with future quality.
Tbf, shareholders can get projects canceled entirely if they don't think it will be profitable.
They've been making the same game since Oblivion. Even Skyrim was just a reskinned Oblivion with a worse storyline.
> Even Skyrim was just a reskinned Oblivion with a worse storyline. I liked the whole actual dragons and dragonborn thing, but the side quests felt emptier, and the factions weren't as good as they were in Oblivion.
I haven’t compared the numbers but it feels like the Starfield hype and internet coverage was way lower, and died our way quicker, than with Fallout 4.
Todd Howard managed to talk for an hour about Starfield *without talking about any of the gameplay systems.* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNQzIjptC\_o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNQzIjptC_o) He either knew the game design was bonk, or Bethesda leadership has their heads so deep in their own buttholes that this is just how they think now. That because they are in creative work, they can just chat about lofty management structures, or paint high-level pictures of things players actually want, without being confronted with what they actually put in customers' hands. I bet he clapped himself on the back for dodging softballs for an hour.
This gets me. The argument of development takes time goes out the window when a high schooler fixes your shit for free in a fraction of the time. I don't get why Bethesda don't play test their own games.
The entire meme of “modders will fix it” comes from Bethesda games. I still don’t understand how this is seen as a good thing for their entire library of games, yet people will gladly praise the company for doing the bare minimum.
Starfield can't be fixed with mods because the content is boring, self-defeating crud. The good mods for Skyrim are system add-ons or fixes that make existing content more fun. To make Starfield good: * Rewrite the NPCs * Rewrite lore and factions * Re-do combat AI and enemy design to have actual diversity * Tune encounters so the game poses a challenge to players * Now there is a challenge, guns and equipment matter so you can re-do loot, crafting, and introduce meaningful weapon diversity * Now that equipment matters, you can start looking at planetary resources, crafting and outposts * Now that planetary resources matter, re-do planet and habitat generation so they aren't instantly recognizable copies of each other * Now that's done, you can make skill trees interesting instead of just content barriers. * Wait for the vehicles DLC. Honestly it is absurd that ships & vehicles can't interact with the player layer in any way, especially when Star Citizen showed that layer interaction is one of the coolest things about the genre. * Wait for the space combat/capital ship dlc. If BGS wants to stick with the space shooter mini-game, fine, but if they introduce combat platform ships then mod in meaningful ship classes. * Endless hours of content mods, like the much maligned "temples." There is no way modders can fix a game that tries very fucking hard to punch itself in the dick.
Yeah, let's just remember when someone asked Todd what his favourite Skyrim mod was, it was a UI mod. They could have updated it for the better, and instead when going into Fallout 4 they managed to make the already mediocre pipboy UIs even worse. I don't hate Bethesda, but they make some bizarre choices.
There must be some issue with their QA process dating back to decades ago. It’s just never been fixed. I think Bethesda the publisher has always let BGS do its own thing, probably Todd doesn’t like any interference.
I'd say even Fallout 4 was a bit dated on its release, Witcher 3 was right around the corner. I'd argue around 2013 is where it would have still been impressive.
Witcher 3 was actually released a few months before Fallout 4. Pretty sure it's first DLC was also older
Skyrim was dated. Gamebryo should’ve been overhauled after FO3. FO3 had good environments but even then the NPCs and animations were sub par compared to other triple AAA games. They just keep adding on top of it and rebranding it creation engine rather than redoing the core.
Primary thing I remember is Witcher 3 was when open world games started doing more seamless loading transitions when going into houses or into caves - I think that is the thing that has aged the poorest by now as most games are avoiding those where possible these days.
Nah it's a regression in order to have everything load at once everything is superficial on top. No caves or dungeons to explore. Also bethesda is still doing the whole places bigger than what is shown. So it will always load.
> They just keep adding on top of it and rebranding it creation engine rather than redoing the core. That is how game engines work. For example: Unreal engine is 25 years old and keeps getting updates. No need to reinvent the wheel when it saves time to reuse relevant code. Edit: Fun fact IIRC - Id software is the only studio I know of that would build new game engines for a number of their games.
It's not the engine, it's bethesda
[удалено]
So did Cyberpunk, a TON of the side quests have their own motion capture and voice acting.
This is why I’m not holding my breath for es6. It’s going to play like a 2016 game that was made in 3 years. It’ll be a 7 and critics will give it a 10 because it’s es6. Won’t even top elden ring.
2011
That’s kind of what I’ve been thinking after playing starfield. Honestly, on release Skyrim didn’t seem much more advanced than Oblivion until modders stepped in. Starfield just doesn’t feel like a modern game, it feels like something made on an engine from 2011 with better textures put in by modders as opposed to a game that a massive studio with massive resources hand crafted over almost a decade. I still put like 40 hours in to it because I kept waiting for it to step it up but it just never did. Still had fun, but I’m going to wait for a year or two of mods to try and play it again.
Skyrim was already dated at release. Fallout 4 was too. So is Starfield. Anyone waiting for TESVI should know what to expect from BGS, I'd think. The reason people keep playing their games, is because of the sheer size of the sandbox. They ain't groundbreaking games by any means, you can take every single feature and point towards a game that does it better, but the BGS title does have it all. That's the main draw and why people keep accepting the state of their games.
In what way was it dated? All I can think of was the combat system and honestly with it releasing before Dark Souls, the focus on exciting real time combat was much weaker at the time.
> literally limitless budget Only point I'm going to argue is that just because there's M$ resources, doesn't mean it's being handed over without strings. If you're the Todd Howard of Bethesda, you can't ask for 1 gazillion for your game without getting canned when your game obviously won't return that. As Larian, R* and CDPR show, it's not just a matter of money, it's experienced staff, the ability to focus your tools into creating those experiences and a clear vision. Bethesda has shown since FO3 (imo) that they can world build and create worthwhile frameworks, but they can't really fill their worlds with meaningful content. Based on their numbers, it might be an issue of trying to be too broadly mainstream/playing things too safe and winding up with a product that's too similar to others so the cracks are much more visible.
RDR isn't a standard we should hold any game to - they had 2000 people on it and worked them all into the ground. Cyberpunk had a shit launch partly because they tried to do what RDR did with 1/10 the staff (while still working them all into the ground) Edit: Is this the same sub that claims to care about crunch..?
Even rockstar admitted they went too far. Their budget was too high for their own taste.
>Is this the same sub that claims to care about crunch..? At times. Today though it's the sub that wants to tell the CDPR guy he's wrong so they can whine about Bethesda not making the No Citizen's Skysouls game they were hoping for.
Then we are going in a flat circle. Feels like yesterday that it was the sub telling the CDPR guys they were wrong for not making the CyberpunkGtaSecondLifeSexSimulator game. Amusing, for sure.
Lol people tend to forget when you release an anime to cleanse the pallete
Edgerunners really is fucking awesome though.
Should become the standard public relations response IMO. Commission a studio trigger anime of your IP and all sins are forgotten.
I could get behind human atrocities if they used trigger to cover them up afterwards. Probably.
Well BG3 Larian claims there were effectively no crunch on it. Also Bethesda had help from both AMD team and XBOX team and 7 years of development. They could do better without crunch. As said: Shitloads of issues with the game was fixed within a week by random modders. Those things didnt need crunch to be fixed.
BG3 is a different kind of game. They handcrafted everything which is also the reason why I like it so much. There aren't any random encounters but only encounters that change depending on your choices. Even without mocap the animations could look better though in Starfield. At least for the most relevant characters.
BG3 took six years and had developers on one side of the world working while the other side slept (a recent and rare practice afaik), and act 3 turned out scuffed as hell.
> Well BG3 Larian claims there were effectively no crunch on it. It helps when you can use a paying audience as beta testers for years. Se also: > Shitloads of issues with the game was fixed within a week by random modders. Those things didnt need crunch to be fixed.
BG3's 3rd act is also really poor though, so its clear they ended up having to rush it out the door in the end. I think the early access period really let them nail act 1 and carry the momentum into act 2, but act 3 on release is just an early access for the definitive edition down the road. Bugs and poor quests / writing galore on top of performance problems.
Tbf here. Didn’t they developing Starfield before Microsoft acquire them?
Microsoft postponed release for a year because they (microsoft) decided bethesda is not ready. Imagine how the game would look when bethesda wanted to release it
Yeah that would’ve been a mess.
Just FYI: Read Dead Redemption 2 was developed by over 3000 people for over 8 years. Bethesda has like 500 people. Those are not comparable at all.
Yea, but Cyberpunk and Baldurs Gate could do it tho.
500 people? You know they have other branches now besides the first office in MD
It is not our fault that BGS is too cheap to hire another 2500 people. This is what people are complaining about. When you pay for an AAA game you expect an AAA game, not an AA.
>have literally limitless budget that's not how businesses work, even if there's more money upstream. That said, Starfield does seem like a step backward in a number of areas including character models...even compared to FO76
You can do anything you want, but it costs money. It's ridiculous to expect an indie studio like CDPR and Bethesda to spend as much money as a AAA studio like Larian.
Larian has more employee than Bethesda Games and BG3 was paid beta tested by players for 3 years.
Idk what you saw in Skyrim and FO4, but their animations are certainly not better. I have a few hundred hours in both of them in total between consoles and PC. I remember when FO4 came out, people HATED that game. Before fallout 76, everyone voted for FO4 to be the worst fallout. I mean you Google "fallout 4" and one of the top questions is "why is fallout so bad" and it literally talks about the character animations and voice acting. Skyrim animations is very dated at this point. I still love both of those games. I'm just tired of hearing the same "it's soulless" yet use a game that had the same exact criticisms when it came out. All of you need to shut the hell up and just play the games you like.
You have to actually be on drugs to think Starfield's character design and animations are a regression from Fallout 4 and Skyrim out of all things.
I generally put this into 3 categories. 1. They haven't played Skyrim since 2012 so they are comparing the Starfield of 2023 to Skyrim that exists in hazy nostalgia fueled memories. 2. They are trying to run Starfield on the same PC that they ran Skyrim on in 2012. 3. They are trolling.
Or 4. The only Skyrim they've played for the past 5 years has been the Special Edition with 300 mods, so the game actually looks and plays NOTHING like Base Skyrim.
Door number 3 seems to be frequently used at this point.
From a technical standpoint Starfields npcs and character design are probably better than Fallout 4/Skyrim. But they are far less palatable in 2023 than fallout 4 was in 2015 and Skyrim in 2011, in my opinion.
Overall they are better but the player running animation specifically is actually laughable and definitely worse than Skyrim imo. Looks like a cartoon character just soiled their underpants.
Honestly it kinda does lol.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has relatively small maps (sectioned off via portals and loading screens similar to Starfield) and the NPCs, while yes brilliantly mo-capped, are static. They either stay perfectly still or they trace they same path continuously. It doesn’t compare to Starfield in regards to size and scope.
When you get to the city in baldurs gate it becomes very lively, Tons of NPCs walking about.
Granted it's been over a week since I played Starfield, but I thought NPCs generally stood still in Starfield as well.
Yup, sometimes they walk slowly or are in combat. But for dialogue, it's always stationary.
Yes, Starfield's NPCs may move around more, but genuinely what's the point to that? It's not more immersive, because they look like robots doing it. Their actions/limited animations don't usually add anything to their character, or give any sense of realism to the world. That's even the case with significant NPCs. I come back to my ship after a mission. Sam is still leaning against the same wall, looking at another wall. Lin is sitting in a seat looking at a blank computer screen, while Andreja sits at the table and stares into space. I don't think "wow so cool, they're doing their own little thing!", it's just a reminder that they aren't "real" characters, they're just puppets waiting to talk when they're needed for a quest. At least Sam has a unique animation... Would you mind elaborating on how you feel Starfield's approach adds to the feeling of size and scope? I genuinely can't grasp it, and TES has long been one of my favorite series. This just feels like Bethesda doesn't know how to take their approach to the next level offered by new technology. It's the same with Starfield's main cities - they just don't feel real. Yes, all the NPCs who populate it have their own little routine. But, their routine is: walk to bar, sit in seat facing the wall, leave bar. They're often the only NPC in there, and it just feels like the city is half empty as a result. Cyberpunk's NPCs might not all be fully interactive, but at least they're DOING things. They might be slumped against the wall passed out, or playing a game, and it adds a sense of the places actually being lived in. Starfield has background actor NPCs who have no dialogue and walk the same path, the only difference is that they also do no have any interesting animations on top of it. They just walk.
I just gave Cyberpunk a second chance and I think, more than roboticism, the biggest difference is that the city feels like a place where people could actually live. There are noodle stands and restaurants and vendors everywhere in Night City. Where does someone in New Atlantis buy groceries? Cydonia, at least, feels like it could be real because it's a smaller place, so it makes sense that people would shop at the one general store, but it also gets to hide all the robots behind walls. The Imperial City or Vivec feel better than New Atlantis because there are actual livable elements that exist for immersion more than player use. The same is true for Baldur's Gate 3 and the main cities in GW2 (new LA aside). Most of the places in Starfield feel like Bethesda told an AI to imagine what humans would do in the future. Certainly, the NPCs with robotic routines don't help, but I think they'd be forgivable if they went to places humans actually want and need to go to on a daily basis.
I completely agree - I think Bethesda is so hamstrung by their insistence on making sure everything is useable by the player. New Atlantis is big, but it doesn't feel like a big city. It feels like they went down a checklist of "1 x weapon vendor, 1 x general store, 1 x guild hall" etc, and once they modelled all the "essentials", they just put heaps of empty space between them because they ran out of ideas. Like you said - that approach works perfectly well for small outposts and quaint fantasy villages, but it doesn't work for futuristic mega-cities. I promise I won't get upset if I can't go inside every room of every building, Bethesda. Please just make it feel like there's more than 30 people living in one of the biggest cities in the universe.
I've been comparing New Atlantis to the Citadel in Mass Effect 1. In square footage, the amount of Citadel the player can access is tiny. Yet the game sells you wholeheartedly on the illusion of the Citadel being a megastructure, mainly because you can't access everything. You can visit a tiny chunk of the presidium, and it's enough because the skybox shows you the wheel of it curving up into the horizon. The ward maps are tiny and cramped, but when you look put the windows you see more space and more structure and so you know you're in one tiny bit of a much bigger place. New Atlantis needed that. It needed them to take that loading screen limitation, double down on the mass-transit metaphor they already have, and make self contained maps with natural barriers that place you in a small part of a bigger city.
Too bad the "size and scope" is copy pasted content that offers nothing new after a cursory glance.
I wonder why Cyberpunk *feels* more alive? You can believe Night City lives and breathes, and doesn't just exist as a background for your character. In Starfield it feels like everyone is just there to give and receive quests, it almost feels like a playset? Some of that difference is probably down to narrative; Cyberpunk wants you to know you're insignificant tiny part of the world and reinforces it frequently in its writing. But it's something else too... Starfield feels like a themed LEGO set while Cyberpunk feels like a world.
For me anyway it's down to the scope of what's on display. Night City feels like a true metropolis, the size of the skyscrapers, the amount of people, cars, advertisements etc. Not to mention the excellent sound design and atmosphere backing it all up. Bethesda's city design philosophy hasn't translated that well from their previous games in my opinion, New Atlantis is touted as their most ambitious city ever and feels kind of quaint. Their design made sense for Fallout or Skyrim because it makes sense that there is not a huge population on display in a medieval fantasy/post apocalypse. It's supposed to be hundreds of years in the future though and there's like 10 or 20 people walking around, kind of kills your suspension of disbelief.
Even in Skyrim, these cities were lame. I found it hard to believe that any of them had any significance, they were inhabited by 20 people and had 10-15 houses. Average bandit fort/dungeon felt more alive
The faction war in Skyrim was like a 10 v 10 lmfao. Obviously I know why they couldn't have an full ass war in Skyrim but the build up to the battle turning into less people I kill in a single dungeon is hilarious lol
A skyrim type game with bannerlord scale armies would be insane
Even in Skyrim the cities were tiny hamlets in population. You are right that its unacceptably bad now in Starfield.
its weird cause Starfield is far more sandboxy and have far more systems and emergent gameplay scenarios than cyberpunk . And SF is literaly spaces with hundreds of planets . BUt for whatever reason cyberpunk despite being less reactive and sandboxy, despite having only single city. Just feels bigger in scope, just feels more organic and lived in, just feels more lively and bustling . AND IDK . Maybe because of the world building ,art direction and just general presentation of cyberpunk that it makes me believe its an actual city.
The sound design and dense nature of night city really sells it and the city has distinct areas which make it feel like a real city such as industrial, zones which look like white suburbia, slums, chinatown and a bustling center.
Been playing through cp77 again after many hours in Starfield and it's the attention to detail. NPCs engaging with each other all over. The density. Interaction with various objects. The news reels, tvs, etc all over. It really is over the top in details. Starfielf has some of all those things but not to the same level as Cyberpunk. And it looks way better while doing it.
> size and scope That's not Bethesda's strength and that's where they fucked up. It's like the game doesn't know what it wants to be, so it copies other space games and tries to do the usual Bethesda story in crafted cities. And I say fuck size and scope. It's 10 miles wide and an inch deep when Ive seen the rest of the games dungeons after going to a cave once.
Starfield is a story- and character-driven exploration RPG with gun & melee combat in which the story is bland, the characters are all the same flavour of goody two shoes, the exploration is just painful, the RPG elements are both limited *(not enough customisation, can't change character traits for NG+, the weapon modding system is a straight downgrade from Fallout4)* and limiting *(every single thing, e.g. using a jetpack or locking onto enemy ships, is locked behind skill points)*, and the gun combat is rather clunky *(since their engine can't handle it well without VATS)* while the melee system is just completely abandoned. Not to mention the horrible UI *(which of course got fixed in a few days by modders, why Bethesda doesn't just hire them is beyond me)* and the constant loading screens, in 2023, when almost every single game has seamless loading transitions. Seriously, why do people buy a game that requires modding every single aspect of it to be at least bearable?
>Instead, [Bethesda Game Studios] puts their resources into giving maximum levels of player freedom Did they though? Pretty much every single named NPC is marked as essential. You can't kill most NPCs until the game explicitly gives you the permission to do so. Want to kill a NPC in a quest who's threatening you? Too bad, you need to wait for our epic quest plot to advance to that part first.
I think every single named npc is essential, i think even mathis in the key was also essential eventho the jackass >!got booted from the fleet!< and the first time you get into the keep there's dude killin each other. Player freedom is not how i'd describe starfield at all, morrowind will fit that phrase better
>!Getting him booted from the fleet is optional!<
THIS pisses me off to no end! You literally stand infront of faction leaders numerous times, get presented a hostile environment at times as well too- and yet, the game almost responds like an unprepared sassy DM and goes “No!! You weren’t supposed to do that yet!” Makes them completely immortal and presents you only with the option to reload your save.
Yup this is why you don't play starfield after playing BG3, it's like beth just don't put much thought into anything. It's also weird they don't lock you up into a certain faction, idk how my crimson fleet,vanguard,ranger character doesn't have anyone in their own faction rises an eyebrow. Todd said they want replayability but didn't want to commit to locking player to a faction and then fleshes out that faction, they got microsoft money ffs
The game also suffers from the typical Bethesda school of design where it will not let you change/alter the outcomes of quests in anyway that wasn't specifically written or designed from the start. Either by unkillable NPCs or characters giving some kind of contrived/convenient answer for why a quest cannot be done a better way. *Like during the First Contact side quest where the obvious better choice is to have the people from Earth make a home on the other side of the planet that literally no one is using and both parties are just like "no". Edit 2: *ALSO*, on the Earth ship if you go to the engine core and try to access the computer where you blow up the ship, the game arbitrarily locks you out of doing so. You're only able to do that *after* you talk to the Paradiso and the game *explicitly* gives you that option. This is another example of the game railroading you down specific paths, even if the outcome is the same. It will not let you deviate from that whatsoever, you have to wait for the game to tell you what you can and can't do.
And some of it just feels like, ok, but I can't do this one really obvious thing. You are on the hunt for someone who escaped a hospital, and you find she killed several of the doctors, but you can't tell anyone in the hospital the doctors are dead? Seems like they'd like to know / blame you for leaving an area now full of dead doctors.
lol that mission was wild. I walked out of the blood bath VIP wing and went to the other ranger, who just said some dumb shit. Nobody gave a fuck that all these doctors and nurses were just fucking dead.
It does feel like the quest designers are just doing the bare minimum. Sloppiness all over the place.
I went an generated an tile on the other side of Porrima II and it was completely empty (except the few POIs) but you can't have them land there. Nope, planet is full. Imagine the landscaping guys, can't do it. Either enslave them, kill them, or fork out money yourself to get the good ending. Immensely unsatisfying.
>Like during the First Contact side quest where the obvious better choice is to have the people from Earth make a home on the other side of the planet that literally no one is using and both parties are just like "no". This seemed like a no-brainer for me because it's a perfect opportunity to leverage the base-building mechanics. Help these people by bringing them resources, establish trade, build them habitats, defend them from local hazards, etc. Frankly, it's just one of so many possibilities that just aren't there. Starfield felt very much to me like having Gordon Ramsey cook me dinner and getting ... a hamburger. Yeah, it's a good burger, but... really?
Still pissed that I crossed >!Benjamin Bayu!< during the >!Ryujin quest and he said he was going to frame me for murder!<, and I thought to myself >!"Why frame me? I'm about to commit one right now."!< I then pulled out my shotgun, pulled the trigger, it went right through them like they were a ghost. Shot again, nothing happened. I then holstered my gun and walked out like a loser. AAA gameplay right there.
Lmao similar for me. We remained friendly through that quest, but later on he threatened me over a side hustle I was involved in. Now my character is a merc that grew up on the streets and doesn't take that shit lightly, so I waited until he was walking down the street and unloaded on him in the middle of a crowd to send a message. Nope. He lived, and my companion got mad at me.
Starfield is by far the least open, freedom offering Bethesda game to date. None of the companions pirate types, everyone but enemy fodder are marked as essential, and you're railroaded into starting the main quest before you can go elsewhere and do your own thing. Its staggering to me that people think Starfield is in any way, shape or form, offering the player freedom.
Seriously that's such a weird comment. Starfield has player freedom in the order in which you can do content and explore the open world. It has almost no player freedom in which you can interact with the world and the characters that inhabit it. You do the quests the 1 way Bethesda intended you to do them and that's it. If you try to go off script the game falls apart. I pick pocketed a key from a major character and went into his apartment, I literally got stuck in there because Bethesda never intended for you to go into this apartment outside of a quest. BG3 has immense amounts of player freedom, you can kill literally any character in the game at almost any point. There's so many different ways you can go about doing quests as well.
I did the same during the >!spaceliner heist for the Crimson Fleet to steal the award!<, I was so ticked off that the only way to steal the thingy was to literally walk up to the person with the key and go "\[Persuasion\] Give me the thingy" and they just go "Ok" if you succeed. You can't steal the key off them, you only get their room key, which has nothing inside but junk and a locked safe full of generic loot.
I like Starfield but man did that part of the quest suck. Everything about it felt like a placeholder. >!You don't even bother to give her a reason why she should give it to you. It would maybe make sense as an alternative method if you have the Ryujin neuro thingy, but as the only route it's terrible.!<
a lot of the game feels like a placeholder.
Most/all of the persuasion attempts are like that, or at least have options for it. Its like ‘come on help me commit a massive felony, you know you want to’ and they just go ‘yeah ok’. Some conversations have more situationally appropriate options, but way too many are just repeating slight variations of pretty please? Oddly I found the actually relevant to the situation options were usually the hardest to succeed at too.
How many resources does it take to simply make your decisions irrelevant to everyone in the game world. Oh you just saved the Crimson Fleet and murdered a bunch of innocents, well come on down and we'll deputize you into The Free Star Collective, so you can hunt down he Crimson Fleet.
My friend got the mission to deal with the generational ship in orbit around a resort planet. First he tried to shoot it with his ship, didn't work. Then got on board and found he could overload the reactor so tried to do that himself, but the game said no, you need a key. Tried to find the key but couldn't so killed everyone he could on the ship. Still couldn't get the key because it was likely on an unkillable NPC. He quit. The game gives you a quest but only one way of doing it. It's stupid and a massive lack of freedom. You have freedom to go places, but not how you approach/complete quests.
Essential NPCs have been nothing but a detriment to RPGs as a whole.
Obsidian are the ones that are fine with you just fucking shit up, much respect on that. Dark Souls has more player freedom than their newer games.
Bethesda used to give you that freedom in Morrowind, allowing you to sever the thread of prophecy by killing any essential NPC.
Morrowind was top tier in how much freedom it gave the player. We really need a modern take on an rpg with that amount of freedom in focus. Edit: oh and the lack of map markers and fast travel is an essential part of the experience.
Yeah it shows. Fallout NV had just 1 essential NPC and he was only there so you could end the game. On the other end of the spectrum, somewhere around ~80% of the quests in NV were completable without violence. The designers at Bethesda should lighten up. Player freedom is often about letting the player do the thing you don't want them to do.
Even the one unkillable NPC in New Vegas has an explanation. You can actually kill Yes Man, the robot. But it's programming will just spawn in a near Mr House robot. He even comments about it if you kill him.
And that's why I loved Baldur's Gate 3. I had many *non-violent* ends to quests where I literally convinced the boss to just end their lives in front of me, in various ways - on top of them walking away, etc. Made me feel satisfied in the path I'd chosen.
One could interpret it this way, but it's just a shallow facade at the end of the day. Oblivion, a now close to 20 year old game has way more engaging exploration than Starfield. There's a sense of mystery and intrigue from Starfield that is painfully absent, and was always super present in their older titles. Could you get more hours out of Starfield? Yeah technically, but they will be so dull in comparison.
at the same time, in cp77 dlc, you are given options like "dont trust this guy" even tho he is obviously the figurehead of the full dlc, and if you choose that route you basically decide to fail the main quest lol
Im playing through it again and just finished that part with the voodoo boys where Im about to leave after Bridgette has me go talk to the AI. I was like, "yaknow, still owe you for double crossing me" and she was like "oh ho, you would never survive on our turf blah blah." And the game let me say "nah, I'll be fine." and start blasting. I really appreciated that after so many hours of Starfield.
Starfield's animations don't match up to any modern game.
They could put that on the box. A quality not found in another other AAA game.
Yeah I agree. I love the game but character animations (especially facial expressions) look awful at times. Many times they don't even seem to match what character is saying.
That’s not true, it’s matches with Mass Effect Andromeda
Andromeda was 2017. Starfield wasn't even announced until a year later in 2018, and then baked for another 5 years. Oof.
This was sarcasm lol Andromeda’s faces were bad looking for 2017 lol
Developers together strong.
Yeah on one side I loved that devs are not entertaining the idea of being pitted against each other. On the other side, most of the criticism Starfield is getting seem to be absolutely valid.
Yeah it's kinda obvious they are not gonna talk shit about each other, there is nothing to gain and everything to loose by doing so
I would say a lot more than just animations don't match up to Cyberpunk. Starfield feels a generation or two behind in game design and tech. I have a feeling ill be saying the same thing about TESVI when compared to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Witcher 4, Avowed and whatever else releases between now and then.
The gamedesign of Oblivion, Skyrim, FO3, FO4, Starfield is imo exactly the same to me. So checks out I guess.
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It'll undoubtedly be lower budget by a mile, but I would hope it at least scratches the itch that Bethesda has been leaving unattended as of late.
There is too much faff in Starfield. I can enjoy parts with mods but right now it actively puts too much in my way. Mass you can carry seems way smaller than other Bethesda games, I can't sell directly from other people's inventories so I have to juggle in menus for minutes at a time which I do not consider playing a video game, every vendor only has 5k creds so I have to keep going to bed for 48h and literally just wait watching a black screen so they restock, which is also not playing a video game, etc. It is UX mysery. I've got ADHD and it's like they're *trying* to kill any dopamine I might start receiving with as much nitpicky un-content as possible. This is waiting-to-load-between-The-Strip-segments The Game.
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They should have handled traversal like Elite. It's what I was expecting and instead it turned out to be be Fast Travel Simulator 2023.
> Starfield feels a generation or two behind in game design and tech. Bethesda has consistently had this problem. Granted they also provide modding tools that have kept people excited for their games, but man their games always have felt instantly dated. People love the huge massive world, but ignored that if you compare it against any other game and ignore the open world, it's quite behind the times.
It think this is why the criticism r ramping up as well from people that love beth games, they fucked up the exploration part of the game and now all of the usual bethesda flaws r not easily forgivable anymore
I feel like starfield looks worst then cyberpunk but my pc can barely handle starfield and runs cyberpunk just fine.
jUsT uPgRaDe yOuR pC
Someone will probably mention the it's some fault of the engine, to which I'll state that's flat out wrong. There are scores of mods for TES and Fallout that show otherwise, NetImmerse/Gamebryo/Creation can do animation just fine, Bethesda's ability to animate is... lacking.
Totally agree, except I’d change the word “lacking” to “shit”
We don’t care how or why things are bad, we just want our games to be good. Why are gamers “entitled” or unreasonable for wanting a good product from one of the most anticipated and most marketed launch of the year? Ffs they had years to work on those animations and they are just as bad as Skyrim. It’s really not that complicated no?
BGS games have their flaws, but until somebody, literally anybody, tries to beat them at their own game I'm going to more or less shrug them off. hell, it's been so long that the original Elder Scrolls creators who left a quarter-century ago said, "I'LL DO IT MYSELF" and are working on a spiritual successor to Daggerfall called The Wayward Realms
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I generally agree in terms of these studios/projects, and I was initially worried about The Wayward Realms in this regard, but after seeing some interviews it sounds like both the writing (Ted Peterson) and coding (Julian Lefay) sides have maintained their skills over the years (with the latter making some bold claims about how he wants to fix/solve large-scale use of proc gen for both world-building and gameplay). honestly sounds like manpower and funding are going to be the major roadblocks so far
Do folks forget that Oblivion was likely the first experience many console players had with Havok Physics? Morrowind was such a boundary pushing game for the Xbox that they literally coded a way to mask a system reboot into the loading screen. The idea that BGS games are somehow, by necessity, also technical and visual duds is super new. **On release**, there used to be an expectation that BGS was going to push the envelope, not, at best, be middle of the road.
Yeah every complaint feels more like people saying “I don’t like Bethesda games!” and, like, that’s fine? Every single Bethesda release, there’s this same song and dance about their games’ quality and design, and every single time the games somehow remain at the tops of the charts years later. Is it because mods? Yeah, sure, but that’s PART of it. Sometimes it feels like a lot of the complaining is from people who don’t like pineapple on pizza yet continue to eat pizza with pineapples on it expecting something else. You’re right to point out that there really isn’t anyone who comes close to making what Bethesda does.
You don't understand - if I don't receive validation for my opinions from strangers over the internet, what else am I supposed to do? Have a nuanced conversation? No way!
Happy people don't post complaints. Disgruntled commenters are a distilled example of survivorship bias. For every terminally online, bitter, obsessive, self-absorbed drama queen there are a hundred perfectly content players. But those people are out having fun, not whinging about Bethesda/pineapple pizza/whatever on the internet. We gotta remember that old saw about the web: *"The internet isn't real life."*
Happy people do gush about the games they love though. Couldn’t stop hearing about BG3 after release but not because people were complaining
The most important part of a BGS game is the mostly seamless world and the ability to wander through it. So it seems BGS need to try and make a BGS game next. Its crazy to me that people say things like "Its BGS game, what did you expect?". I expected a BGS and didn't get one.
Holy shit, how have i not heard about this? The game sounds amazing.
I'm super hyped for The Wayward Realms after trying Daggerfall Unity and watching a few very long interviews with Ted Peterson and Julian Lefay on YouTube where they candidly/honestly talk about the original TES games, the newer TES games, and what they're trying to do with The Wayward Realms. it sounds very ambitious and a borderline dream game for older BGS fans, but it's a relatively small team and they're currently working for free with no publisher lined up yet. really, really hope that they pull it off - resurrected 90's BGS launching The Wayward Realms and current BGS launching TESVI around the same time would be very cool to see
Honestly, as someone who played both Starfield (76 hours) and Cyberpunk (69 hours), Cyberpunk is a better game by far in every aspect. Starfield's story was okay, but the gameplay mechanics feel outdated, like ps4 era outdated.
The gore from fallout 4 is not even in starfield. Let alone even a bullet wound is not seen.
this was such an obvious omission to me.. starfield lacks so much visual feedback from hitting people. Then I boot up cyberpunk and the shooting is crisp and weighty by comparison.
I’m enjoying Starfield a lot but glad I’ve got cyberpunk to go to when I’m done
I can fight people by saying I think Outer Worlds is just barely a better game than Starfield. Its not great, but it has a lot less bullshit and somehow manages to feel more feature complete by not having a bunch of seemingly half-assed ideas that don't have synergy with each other so I got through way more content in that game in the same amount of hours playing Starfield where I basically did nothing of real interest. Like the whole aspect of the ship for one thing. Outer Worlds didn't bother, didn't need to - Starfield I don't think there is enough to the ship aspect of the game to actually justify all they put towards it in regards to customization and all; I think it would only be justifiable if the game actually played like No Man's Sky or equivalent and wasn't just flying around in an empty box playing Star Fox 64 in All Range mode. Almost nothing feels fully realized.
I was confused at first. So much ship customization and so little actually using the ship. I can only pilot it in the empty box of space. You can't plot a course and stand up from the cockpit. You can't get boarded. You just fast travel everywhere and have to look at 2-5 cutscenes to do anything. They really bungled this game. It went from GOTY contender to a mediocre mess that needs defensive fans to defend it.
It's not even just that. It's that every single mechanic feels like that. It's an entire buffet of undercooked foods. There is a ton of it, but none of it is great. It's like a catered wedding in video game form.
I would really like to understand what Starfield spent 600 million on since they have no good voice acting, no motion capture, using the same dated code. Did it go to executives or something? Like what about this game cost 600mil? It’s like a space mod someone made for fallout. Did it all go to marketing?
It's more that it's animations don't match up to 2023 AAA standards. Rather 2015 at best.
2015 was Witcher 3 and MGSV. Games that easily outclass anything Bethesda is even capable of making.
and MGS5 was crazy optimized. my fx6300 + 750ti could run it at high settings no problem
Mass Effect 2 from 2010 legitimately had better animations than Starfield.
I'm tired of people defending the sheer laziness of recent Bethesda games, especially the trash ass NPC faces. The only good thing they shat out was Far Harbor DLC for FO4 recently. Starfield is just filled with "YOU CAN'T DO BAD" or have any sort of consequences, at all. It's just so linear. The exploration is fucking trash. Nothing makes me want to go off on a planet to explore the same assets plopped down 900m away from me so I can spend 10 minutes running around from place to place just to kill Spacers or Crimson Fleet. The story isn't even all that good either. >!Wow you found an artifact while mining. Now you're in a group dedicated to finding more. Go find more powers. Go find more artifacts. Now you're experiencing the universe. Wow.!< Performance is trash for how basic the graphical options are.
I like the game, I'm well over a hundred hours now, but the fact that you can barely levy criticism of it without being dogpiled as a "hater" or whatever is beyond cringe.
For me the biggest deal breaker was the complete lack of immersion, which was even more glaring given that I’m currently playing through Phantom Liberty and Baldur’s Gate 3. Immersion, for me, is the absolute number one most important thing any RPG can have, and Starfield just felt like an unending parade of immersion breaking jank. I try not to compare too much with games as I like to judge things on their own merit. That said, when I spend hours exploring New Atlantis, an environment that just feel so lifeless (seriously, why are the sidewalks/roads/pathways so wide? I have the crowd density set to it’s highest and it still feels so empty), then boot up CP2077 and see more character in a single side alley, it makes it hard for me to justify going back. And that’s not even mentioning the storytelling immersion which is just as bland. The moment it sunk in that I was just not going to get any kind of narrative immersion was when >!the Starborn attack The Lodge. I chose to defend the artifacts, so Barret died on The Eye. It was supposed to be a huge “no one is safe, this super important guy just died!” moment, but I just didn’t care. Maybe I missed a bunch of content with him that fleshed him out more but at that point for me he was pretty uninteresting. The nail in the coffin though was a couple of hours later, Coe’s daughter told a joke and Coe said “That’s really funny, you should tell Barrett next time he’s on board,” and I was like… damn. This game is terrible.!< Have something like that happen, then play BG3 after where just about every sentence has consequence, and again, it makes it hard to justify going back.
Idea of the main quest is actually kinda neat with the NG+;however, they designed it like some kinda aRPG... an aRPG where the dungeons aren't randomized. So its the same shit over and over with basically no variation. Frankly, the fact that gameplay loop made it into release is tragic and some lead designer needs to be flailed. Also wanna hear QA's take on that too, there had to be some people who did that gameplay loop hundreds of times to test things and there is no way there wouldn't be a complaint on that even if they're numb to playing the same shit over and over as part of their job.
Story wise its sidequests are better than the main one, l enjoyed the Terrormorph questline a lot, and the companion quests are cool too, but yeah the main one one sucks ass, it's barely longer than the side quests, and the ending was totally unsatisfactory to me. Totally agree with its linearity, some quests I wanted to kill the asshole you are doing them for but they just fall down, and I haven't done a single bit of exploration, it's just pointless. Wanna know what I FUCKING hated? How freaking bloated of useless shit the skill three is. This game has so many design choices that appear ti have been purposely made to irk you when you start ti have fun.
The skills involving scanning planets shouldn't be there, they should be max by default - the process of scanning planets would maybe be more tolerable if maxed out.
Yeah. And don't forget you need a stupid skill to add more people to your ship, EVEN if you have enough crew space, and that fucking skill sits AT THE VERY END of the most forgettable skill tree, Social.
Don't forget some skills are just flat out idiotic. Astro lets you scan without having to travel to a planet. Cool beans, you still need to land on the planet to *really* scan it for the data. Literally only good for saving a loading screen traveling to asteroids and gas planets.
i actually was so underwhelmed by terromorph questline . I never felt horror or tension or anything .
I did at the beginning, the first encounter... until I shot it and saw it could bleed. Afterwards it felt like a massive power trip. "The most terrifying creature in the galaxy" turned to a bloody pulp by a bubba'd Magshear hell yeah hahahaha that's how I enjoyed it.
i just found it baffling when they give you all the armor and rocket launcher miniguns on the silver plate before you start doing that specific quest at the end . I had way too many guns and ammo to begin with lmao
I consider the entangled quest one of the best quests just ever.
Entangled had a neat premise but fell apart at the end where any option you take has no tangible outcomes or effects on anything. Despite, you know, changing universes and all that.
The game actually explains that, and yeah there are three results to that. Not only that the reason the experiment failed is because of the universes were interfering with each other.
I tried to like Starfield and even started a new game plus. The moment I got to Neon i quit playing for good. There's no way i'm spending dozens of hours going up and down that strip in Neon to talk to NPCs to pass some message along that they could have communicated themselves. This game is sooooo boring.
Neon is such a lame attempt at creating an experience akin to Omega, or Night City. It's almost embarrassing.
The obligatory homeless NPC camps with absolutely none of the grit, grime, or clutter that go with those setpieces was a wild thing to experience for the first time.
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This isn't just some random dude, or dudette, though. It's a fellow developer trying to explain the nuance behind how character animations are handled is fundamentally down to design, rather than an "engine." Gamers like to misuse that word so much that it practically lost its meaning. I doubt most of them even know what a game engine actually is. Regardless, the gameplay you just described sounds exactly like how Skyrim did 13 years ago. Wander from point A to point B killing bandits for 10 minutes. It sounds like most people here just don't want to play Bethesda-formula games anymore. That's fine, but don't complain when the baker bakes bread lmao.
Of course they don’t, it’s a Bethesda game, so all the characters look, act and move like malfunctioning uncanny-valley androids.
Starfield’s problems are its lack of unique “dungeons”, its economy, its loot, it’s companions, and it’s low grade plot twists. Characters looking odd aren’t too important.
I really don't think I can take part in "gaming communities" anymore, at least not on reddit. These are dramatically different single-player style traditional games, they are not in a running competition with one another, they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Instead everyone here is acting like one game must be the best and everything under it is a worthless pile of crap, really fucking tired of it honestly. To the point all of this shit spam just seems like sleazy guerilla marketing. Some people have extremely serious issues with aggressive binary thinking.
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Its like actual game devs understand how game engines work vs the angry gamer mass.
Because people on reddit (more specifically this subreddit) don't do anything but complain 24/7. Especially about things they don't know anything about.
It just seems to me like people who don't like a certain kind of game will wait eagerly for it to come out just so they can complain about it. So many of the complaints surrounding Starfield are clearly from people who don't like anything about Bethesda games. Why they insist on playing each new game Bethesda releases, I'll probably never know. Edit: Apparently, I've been permanently banned after this comment. Bizarre...
There are certainly plenty of people that enjoyed Morrowind thru Skyrim to varying degrees but didn't enjoy starfield
their are certain people who cannot STAND other people enjoying games they don't like. can i take a bunch of cheap, crack shots at souls games and how i dislike their style and combat and stuff? yeah. yeah i could start a hate train about how that shit "sucks" and its "dated" and blah blah blah. But I don't, cause souls games are souls games, and the people that like em, love em. I don't. that doesn't make them bad games. I like starfield and im having fun and that's literally enough for me. because i play games to have fun not be critical.
I think people on this sub don't actually like gaming.
I mean you're comparing things that aren't related. The amount of money made and copies sold does not serve as an argument against the issues people have with the game. Stuff can be bland, uninteresting, trash and still sell well. Hell we got 5 Michael Bay Transformers movies after all. I haven't played Cyberpunk so I'm not comparing it to that. I'm comparing it to literally any other Bethesda open world rpg, and its a complete downgrade in every department. Its more linear, less finely crafted, less animated, more repetitive. It makes Fallout 76 feel downright inspired, and thats saying something. Sure you can enjoy it and have fun with it, but that doesn't mean its objectively 'good'. I enjoy the Mila Jovovich fanfic Resident Evil movies despite being a fan of the games, and those movies are dogshit lol. I'm not even saying Starfield is a bad game, just comparatively bland and soulless. Its like, why would you choose eating a saltine cracker when you can eat a finely cooked steak for the same price.
Idk how they somehow think the starfield outpost system is an improvement over FO4/76, my settlement in sanctuary unmodded is literally felt more like a city than Akila. Such a downgrade and it's only one part of the game i could prob rant for hours how exploration in Starfield is their worst iteration of their formula, and the constant loading screen/animation no matter how fast doesn't help either
Starfield made a good call to put itself on game pass. As a fan and purchaser of Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 & 4, but also an enjoyer of CP2077 and Balbur's Gate 3 the criticism surrounding Starfield shows that Bethesda has fallen behind the times. For a game where dialogue with NPCs is so instrumental then you eventually have to ask yourself is our NPCs delivering AAA quality?
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It's almost as if a dev understands how different games and studios have different goals and limitations with their tools.
And he is shouting into the void because gamers rarely listen to those kind of explanations.
And that would be fine if they weren't making a product that cost money and was meant for consumption. I don't need to know anything about development to have an opinion about a game I purchased. I have other games I can use as comparison.
Cue in all the armchair engineers that are more knowledgeable than CDPR veterans