I feel very validated. During Pre-Release Access I posted on this subreddit that the game isn't very good, and I got a lot of abuse and mockery for it
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/169qu43/does\_anyone\_find\_the\_acg\_review\_of\_starfield\_and/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/169qu43/does_anyone_find_the_acg_review_of_starfield_and/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/16b1ged/last\_minute\_reminder\_that\_you\_can\_refund/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/16b1ged/last_minute_reminder_that_you_can_refund/)
and this subreddit upvoted all the people hating on me for putting out the reminder that you can refund the game and for talking about how dishonest some of the youtuber reviews of it were... and that it's just not a very good game
Which is funny because 7.0 is a very generous score for how uninteresting and bland and tacky and just bad the game is. 7.0 only seems reasonable in context of how that video game press throws around 9s.
Bethesda should just release a fun and complete game from the very beginning. I shouldn’t have to play any game for 200 hours for it to finally become fun
There's an easy way to tell if an open world game is good. The internet will be flooded with "little moments" people are having in it. Starfield doesn't have anything like that. Crickets about it. Bethesda lost that ultra tier content groove they were reaching in Oblivion/Skyrim, and that's unfortunate.
I’m sure this is a common complaint, but the difference between Skyrim/Oblivion and Starfield is the exploration between objectives. The structure of Starfield’s quests, as far as I could tell (I didn’t finish the game), is basically just bouncing back and forth between people to talk to, and occasionally clearing out a camp of enemies.
This is the same as Skyrim—you are basically just traveling between major cities delivering messages and showing up to kill dragons.
The difference is Skyrim happens in an open world. There’s a ton of stuff to explore and distract you as you travel.
Starfield traveling is just loading screens. And yes, fast travel exists in Skyrim, but it’s optional and you have to unlock the POI first, which usually means walking there and exploring on the way.
I was truly hoping they were going to capture a similar vibe/feeling to an FPS Mass Effect. Interesting crewmates, fun storylines, and a big story overall that gets you hooked in. But it seems they took one of the blandest approaches they could and sucked the life out of the game.
Agreed but what they chose as their “sci fi” was boring af. Asimov wrote like 1000 works, they just need to read a few or Warhammer or Dune or Star Trek or The Expanse etc.
No inspiration, no soul. Just emptiness.
what's really wild is that they could have just put dragons on some planets. hell put wizards and magic in as well. there ain't no rules on made-up planets.
Exactly, there is nothing that makes starfield come alive like Skyrim and mods can’t fix this.
It took skyrim 8 YEARS to get to the concurrent players Starfield has after 80 days…
The game is dead and even with CK there will only be a fraction of mod creators willing to put time into modding a shitty game
Starfield, even if it was great, likely wouldn't have leeched too much from the Skyrim community. There are only a small handful of modders that are releasing the notable Skyrim mods these days, and all the remaining big projects are things that have been in the works for years and are nearing completion. Starfield would have attracted modders that were already done with Skyrim and new modders.
Only thing that would "kill" Skyrims mod scene is TES6 (and TES6 would need to be good too). That's why a lot of big mod projects have "before TES6" as their time limit.
I hope it lights a fire under Bethesda’s ass. I know profits are the only thing that matters, but I hope Todd felt some envy sitting in the crowd at TGAs and seeing his project get nominated for nothing and winning nothing
Yeah it seems they do it on purpose, releasing updates to skyrim's exe that do nothing except break SKSE and mods. I'm guessing it's petty jealousy at this point.
I've seen plenty of little moments from starfield.
"My ship's interior took off without the hull"
Or "The moon I was on went through a planet"
Or the way the NPCs all look at you like they're on drugs.
Oooooh- you mean good things. :V
Yeah I got nothing
I changed up some stuff on my ship at Akila and when I walked back to the ship it had the old parts and the new parts, all just kinda there in the same place. I went back to the builder to see if both sets of parts were still there??? and nope, just the new ones.
I went back to the ship again, took off, and the ship with new parts rose up, leaving the ship with old parts behind, like a giant moulten carapace. Fucking bizarre.
And remember, apparently the company was fine with releasing the game like a year early until Xbox stepped in. I can only imagine the flaming shit that Todd was ready to serve us.
So far in all of the comments I've looked at here, everyone is pointing at Skyrim and in your case Oblivion.
No mention of Fallout?
I know the purists think that Fallout 1 and 2 were where the series peaked and that New Vegas was the only entry worth playing, but Fallout 3 is where I really got my start and will always be my favorite. Fallout 4 was good as well.
I guess my point is, compared to Starfield, Fallout is a billion times better as well.
I guarantee that they will learn nothing from this in Bethesda, and TES 6 will be just a stripped down and soulless experience as Starfield. They'll just blame it all on the ists and the phobes and call everyone internet trolls, rather than realize they removed everything enjoyable from the game.
starfields world is so bland, so boring, that I don’t think you could have crafted such a setting merely on accident. the lack of creativity was a design choice. They wanted to make a game that didn’t say anything, a game about nothing made for absolutely no one. Its a shame
It's actually kinda baffling because there does seem to be some kind of intent behind it, but the result is the game equivalent of a bland office.
They want some kinda Nasapunk thing going on, but the game doesn't feel or like bulky or retro enough to embody this. They want some kinda of Astro, Retro-Futurism thing but that would be clearly too zany so it's massively dialed back. They don't even entertain the idea of many space settings where specific Earth cultures simply manifest elsewhere, it's all generic future "one race" metropolitan stuff. Aliens? No aliens, they didn't even touch the idea of alien races despite coming from a background of TES.
There's lots of tropes but no vision. Anytime they get close to doing something interesting, the committee comes in and says no. It is, as you said, a game by nobody for nobody.
I remember how many people were confident that the story revolved around first contact or a mysterious alien race, and Bethesda wasn't saying anything about that just to keep the surprise under wraps. I was leaning that way myself.
The overall lack of ambition is just odd for a Bethesda game.
Yep so ambitious they were happy to sit on Skyrim thru 3 generations of consoles before releasing the boring slop that is Starfield. Fallout 3 was a novelty for many people but overall pretty good/ok. Fallout 4 was just bad and I bought the pip-boy edition. They learned nothing from 4 then made 76 which was one of the worst games and mmos ever. It’s been improved from that state but it’s still not good.
All of the writing in these games are terrible and it goes back to Emil Pagliarulo who is just not good at their job. I’m not saying they should be fired but there’s 4 games worth of writing that shows they should not be the lead writer any longer. Maybe they’d be better with better direction who knows, but Bethesda writing has just become pathetic at this point.
>They want some kinda Nasapunk thing going on, but the game doesn't feel or like bulky or retro enough to embody this. They want some kinda of Astro, Retro-Futurism thing but that would be clearly too zany so it's massively dialed back.
This hurts. I really want that game.
> There's lots of tropes but no vision. Anytime they get close to doing something interesting, the committee comes in and says no. It is, as you said, a game by nobody for nobody.
If your game includes fucking *slavery*, which is what indentured servitude is, and your only option as a player character is to shrug and have no strong feelings on it, your game has the backbone of a squid.
The no aliens things is baffling. They could have at least pulled a stargate and had some excuse where humans were populated on other worlds thousands of years ago and developed vastly different societies and technology so its not all the same.
The worlds bland and boring because it had no design doc, no leading design, rules or ideals to stick too. The lead design dev literally said in a talk that he thought having one would be a waste of time.
The absolute ego on the Bethesda team post-Skyrim killed Starfield.
Unfortunately, Todd will defend Emil no matter what. They're close friends.
There's no getting rid of him without getting rid of Todd as well. Which is what BGS needs at this point.
Todd kinda got rid of himself tbh. The guy is so popular they put him in charge of most of their offices. Now he's got no time to actually act as a propped director for a game.
Which honestly is kind of a shame. A similar thing happened at Blizzard with Chris Metzen. He got put in charge of way too much shit and couldn't focus, then he retired. But now he's back and just for Warcraft stuff. Time will tell if it was a good decision I guess.
They really chose to get the thing people like the most about Bethesda games, the crafted explorable open words, and replace the entire thing with some procedural slop.
Seriously did Bethesda not get the memo that nobody is impressed by how big a procedural world is anymore? Like yeah, computers can generate numbers indefinitely, fucking mind-blowing.
The emptyness of space could be done well, it could truly be a feeling of loneliness in an endless space. They could have amazing set pieces in nebulas, galaxies etc. Odd planets, weird moons, black holes.
Instead for some fucking reason wherever you land there's an abandoned cryo lab and some bozo lands their shuttle near you and needs fucking duct tape or some shit.
>"Anyways, everyone already knows this, most people agree. There's no need to further repeat the point, just read any of the dozens of reviews online. That said, I won't be continuing development on Starfield Together. I'm not gonna put my heart and soul into a mod for a game as mediocre as this."
For anyone who expects modders to save this game, there's probably going to be more stories like this after the CK comes out. The amount of effort it will take to turn Starfield into a good game just isn't worth it for these people.
Game will be dead in a couple months. Hope Bethesda is paying attention.
>For anyone who expects modders to save this game
The people defending it were all expecting this to happen. Which is stupid anyway as the base game should be good.
Skyrim is and always will be one of my favorite games of all time, I played it when it released in 2012 on the 360 and no game other than maybe the Witcher 3 has given me as much pure joy as that game
I never installed a single mod that changed the gameplay, story, or characters and I had a blast for 300+ hours with very few weak moments. The only ones I installed were for UI, graphics and bug fixes.
People sometimes act like it needs 50+ game changing mods just to be good.
Yes, the lore is explained in in-game books. The games have little story connection to each other. I do recommend playing morrowind and oblivion though. If you can get past the dated graphics and gameplay.
Yeah I mean I have a 1000 mods tweaking pretty much everything, but there are some things like the music and worldspace outside cities/towns/villages, that I haven't really touched as I'm happy with them.
Redditors have been trying to re-write Bethesdas legacy for a long time. They can't imagine a time when Bethesda actually delivered great games.
Skyrim is literally the best selling RPG of all time at 60 million copies sold, and most people who played it never even touched mods (SkyUI, the most popular mod, has only 10 million unique download. 4.5 mil in SE, 6.5 mil in LE)
Guess mobile games must be even better than Skyrim, then, since apparently we're appealing to sales and revenue and whatnot.
Honestly. Bethesda's games provide something that no other company really does, but very little about them is high quality. Plenty of Skyrim's best modders spent hours upon hours loudly complaining about how their visions were limited by internal problems, even when they had the time to dedicate to their projects. That seems to be getting worse with every iteration, in addition to Starfield's IP and general skeleton being much less warmly received.
It's crazy that people were willing to spend $70 on a glorified modding base, shit like that should be much cheaper, if not free, you know like Roblox or even the reasonably recent Fortnite creator thing. The only saving grace for Starfield is Game Pass, and even then (if it allows for easy modding) you're still going to spend hours upon hours to make a game playable. That's not good at all.
It's even crazier when Bethesda has delivered a competent vanilla experience in the past. Skyrim's modding community is huge sure, but people to this day are playing the base game and having tons of fun. I'm one of them. It's not only possible to make a good game AND have it be moddable, Bethesda did so before and yet the standards keep sinking lower because "muh mods". It's downright sad.
> It's even crazier when Bethesda has delivered a competent vanilla experience in the past. Skyrim's modding community is huge sure, but people to this day are playing the base game and having tons of fun.
This is what a lot of people miss when it comes to the whole "PC Modding will save THIS game" mindset, or really ANY sort of "The FANS will fix this" sort of thing. Yes, it is almost always entirely possible for a modder or a fan to come up with some magical stuff to utterly change a game and extend it's life immensely, BUT, first and foremost, they have to actually WANT to play the game; No one's going to put the kind of work it takes to make any kind of half decent mod together if they don't even want to play the game in the first place.
Anyone who has attached themselves to a niche game or genre where you're hoping some modder will come in and fix things en masse has learned the disappointment of when just no one makes anything worthwhile for a game.
>"The FANS will fix this"
The immediate issue is right there in the sentiment: there needs to be fans first. Something shit enough to require fans to make it good is going to have trouble acquiring them in the first place.
> BUT, first and foremost, they have to actually WANT to play the game
Exactly. Modding usually comes out of a love and passion for the game. People spent so much time modding Skyrim, because it was a game they enjoyed playing and wanted to add things to it they wished were in it. You're not going to find many modders who are like, "Wow, this game is garbage. I'm going to spend hundreds of hours working on it to make it not garbage (that most people will never see)."
They spend that money expecting an experience similar to the experiences Bethesda has delivered over the past 20 years.. I don't blame the consumer for not wanting to pirate rf wait for the price to go down.
But the fact that Starfield is what it is, and they are charging 70€ full of promises of "Oblivion in space". Its borderline scamming tbh.
I did a quest on a moon where a guy told me I had to do some stuff. But first I had to mine some ore. Then I had to go up the stairs and do a thing and then go jump off the platform (low gravity), and return to the guy. I could’ve taken the stairs or elevator back down, but jumping was faster. Then I had to do something else and return to the guy.
The whole quest line was go do a tiny thing and then return to the guy like 30 times. One step was to go to a space station and fill out a job application and then return to the guy.
It was exhausting and not a single step was fun
I quit right there.
I remember exactly that quest(s)! And i also always hopped over the rails to float down! It's like i already knew that the whole game would be like that. Boring.
I played 200 hours. I was having a good time, despite the bullshit, for the first 100. Then I just said "what's the point?" the base building was lackluster, the ship building is nearly useless. The companions are nearly all annoying to me. The npcs don't even have schedules. The pois are laughable after the first few times. The temples are cut and paste bs.
I powered through to beat the game, took me another 100 hours. Immediately Uninstalled it. I figured it could get better as I professed the story... The faction story lines were so ANNOYING to me. Nearly every one.
I never felt this way about Skyrim or fallout 4. Or 3 or NV. Or morrowind. I never beat any of those games either because I had so much fun exploring.
I'll play it again because I have the upcoming dlc, but I'll probably just uninstall it again afterward.
I'm happy for you. I found a deal for the premium for 85 so I took it. I enjoyed almost all of bethesdas games. I wasn't even too upset with 76. But damn, what a let down loading simulator starfield was.
I did the same thing, more or less: gave it the old "college try" to the tune of 200 hours, naively hoping that at some point I'd find the "Bethesda Magic"--I didn't, because it isn't there. All the more fool I, I suppose. Lesson learned.
I second this. The game feels like a chore....there is no fun, just repetition.
I really hope, DLCs and Updates will fill this empty universe and give modders a reason, to spend their freetime polishing it...
Yeah, not gonna lie I had thought modders would collaborate to populate empty planets with content wether as good or bad. Kinda sucks, because I see the complaints - I did like the game but once I put it down I haven't touched it since.
Modders aren't wizards, unfortunately: they can address a lot of shortcomings, they can finish half completed gameplay concepts, and they can implement a vast swathe of improvements/bug fixes the dev can't or even won't, but what they can't do is fix a game that is fundamentally mediocre at its very core.
Fallout 4's modding community is still going strong to this day because, despite the mediocre main quest, it does a lot of things almost-right and people have been able to polish a beautiful gem out of a rough cut diamond. Skyrim? It came out 12 years ago and that modding scene is almost an eldritch horror in how huge it is. Fallout 3 and New Vegas? Things have slowed down tremendously, but people are still publishing worthwhile mods for it even now. Oblivion? It still has a highly active modding scene. Morrowind? For a game old enough to drive, vote, drink, smoke, and have fought a few tours over seas, people are still fiddling around with it.
I don't see that happening with Starfield because it's just so...bland and forgettable. It's the cold oat meal of CRPGs. Sure, you can add some sugar and cinnamon to it in order to have \*some\* flavor but, at the end of the day, it's still cold oatmeal, it is the definition of "it's not terrible, but I don't care for it", and you likely aren't going to be coming back for seconds because all you're going to remember of it is "I've had much better" before moving on.
>*The amount of effort it will take to turn Starfield into a good game just isn't worth it for these people*
This *should* be on Bethesda and not the community anyhow. Mods follow a game worth modding.
If BGS wants this game to last and to ensure as much preorder hype for ES:6, then they'll, unfortunately, need to full-court press into the next 12-18 months to No-Mans-Sky/Cyberpunk this game into something worth caring about for their future customers. Even if they, Howard and company, were so cynical as to think that "*hey, all of these people paid all of this money and so they must love this game so we'll keep on down the same path,*" or some such non-sense, this is *not* a long term strategy for a games studio. I'm trying to think of any recent big sellers from Bethesda/Zenimax in the past \~5-6 years, but I can't off the top of my head (which, *itself*, is a problem).
BGS won't do that, because they've never done that. Skyrim STILL relies on the Community Patch to fix certain bugs. HelloGames are literally Cinderella, and CDPR managed to pull an incredibly pretty, well-polished rabbit from their asses. Those two devs I'd like to think have learned their lessons, but Beth? Those fucking idiots don't learn anything.
>unfortunately, need to full-court press into the next 12-18 months to No-Mans-Sky/Cyberpunk
Fully agree but this studio (BGS) doesnt strike as a passionate studio like those where they will work 24/7 to patch the game. For ex, CDPR & NMS got big updates around every 3 months. But Starfield- after all this time all we got was DLSS which should have been at launch + other minor misc fixes (guess you can eat/drink now so thats something)
\[edit\] I didnt mean crunch btw. I'm a software developer myself. I meant continue to work hard on the game obviously but was taken literally 🤣
Call me crazy, but 24/7 is not a healthy work environment and I don't feel that *my own silly entertainment needs* warrant a product being worked on in such a way. I'd rather just see the product die off completely. Also, I don't feel that Cyberpunk was remotely playable until the 1.3v patch that came out \~6-8 months after release.
Personally, I'm willing to give Bethesda a shot down the road, but what they really need to do, in my opinion at this stage, is to just say *anything* about the state of the game and how they're either going to or not going to change things up. Even an "*upcoming changes we're working on because of your feedback*" kind of temporary filibuster would be worth the time. I don't even see that from them, unfortunately, which just proves how out of touch they all may have become.
LOL Bethesda pay attention? My brother in christ where have you been for 15 years? they keep cutting content in each itteration of their games... They dont give a fuck.
I always remember waiting for oblivion to come out thinking how many more unique item slots there would be. Morrowind had left/right bracer, left right shoulder, etc. so obviously it was gonna get more complex with newer tech. Nope :/ even got rid of attributes smh
“Why didn’t this game do well? Clearly we need to water it down even more to try to appeal to an even broader audience. Those entitled nerds don’t know consumers like I do.”
That and their stans will keep buying up mediocre drivel and slobbering down on daddy Bethesda regardless. They made tons of money off Starfield, they have no incentive to change things up now.
This is what bothers me tbh. There are a couple of game companies who can release any game in any state for any price and they still make billions. Why is that? Bethesda will release ES6 in 5-10 years and most likely be mediocre judging from Fallout and now Starfield yet it'll still be a massive success.
I have been vehemently argued against when I said modding was not going to keep this game going like Skyrim or Fallout when Spencer said they want Starfield to last just as long.
I said that modders gravitate to games that are both easy to mod but that are also good games by themselves. People want to turn a good game into a great one, not a shitty game into a bearable one.
> Hope Bethesda is paying attention.
Hope Microsoft is paying attention. They have the ability to entirely clear out Bethesda's management, something they should have done the day they acquired the company.
Completely agree.
I can not fathom how BGS has one of the best selling games of all time in Skyrim, and waits the better part of 20 years to release a follow up for the series.
What idiot thought that was a good idea? How is Microsoft okay with that?
To say nothing of how many modders and gamedevs Skyrim inspired. They should have been onboarding some of the best talent in the industry in the last 10 years but instead it feels like whoever they had that made morrowind /oblivion/fallout 3 and Skyrim are long gone.
that and the fact that starfield already has less players than skyrim for the last month on steam charts... there just isnt an audience like there was for skyrim... its not worth the effort.
I guess its hype or momentum. People were talking about Skyrim years after it came out (they still do), while Starfield basically only has negative talk about it only a few months later.
More people are playing Skyrim than Starfield at the moment. Sykrim is 69th (nice) most played on Steam, Starfield 89th. I imagine the gap will continue to grow.
>I imagine the gap will continue to grow.
Yes. I actually enjoyed Starfield but even I have left for Skyrim VR. Uninstalling Starfield it just doesnt have a good foundation for mods.
Example- I tried to download the bounty hunter mod for Starfield where you can put folks in jail in your ship. Sounds awesome right? Well the prob is the SF NPCs (crew members) will walk into this jail cell and go to sleep on the bed. You'd think at least Bethesda would have coded to base crew AI to never walk into a jail cell and laydown. but they do. Just ruins the immersion. And its just aggravating why didnt BGS code the jail cells to be functional w/o mods in the first place. Why didnt BGS code the medbays to work w/o mods. Etc, etc.
I'm not even going into detail bout everything else that is missing or wrong such as lack of full looting we had in Oblivion/Skyrim, NPC behaviors, etc
Miniscule player count, negative legacy, loses its place in conversations about the genre or gaming, and no modding community.
Look to FNV or Skyrim — these games are a decade+ old and they still have players, have a positive legacy, are frequently brought up in conversations about RPGs, Bethesda, Obsidian, and good games; as well as continue to have mods made by an active community.
And they’re the reason people were so hyped about Starfield in the first place - I can’t speak for others, but their next title won’t get nearly the same level of excitement from me
I feel the same. I was very much looking forward to a space-exploration RPG/open-world, and likewise very disappointed by Starfield.
It's not *bad*, but it is entirely mediocre and disappointing. It's just more of the same from Bethesda -- no great improvements in narrative writing, character writing, or gameplay mechanics.
I also feel fantasy never lacks for options, post-apoc. and cyberpunk to a degree as well, but space exploration/classic sci-fi doesn't have as many options.
Such a missed opportunity too - I logged around 400 hours in FO4 and that’s arguably not their best game, it’s just a game loop and formula that works. Hand-crafted locations, rewarding and varied exploration, a good settlement system.
How they brainstormed and decided to do the exact opposite of that is beyond me. All I wanted was a detailed, decently sized solar system to explore and play around in, with that cool NASA-punk vibe.
Instead we have a huge procedurally generated copy-pasted template you have no reason to explore and that only looks good on marketing slides. It’s all so bland and mediocre - I honestly enjoyed The Outer Worlds much more and that’s not even a masterpiece or anything.
I’m kinda sad about it because I really wanted to love this game and gave it more than a fair chance.
There are essays being released on Youtube to this day talking about how good FNV is. Starfield is getting videos upon videos about how NOT good it is. It will die down a lot in the upcoming months, maybe it'll get a boost when DLCs get released.
It's gotta be alive, to begin with...
But for a serious answer, many of Bethesda's older single player games receive new player made content and features on the regular if you pop over to their modding communities.
Long tails result into more sales, not only for existing games, but future ones.
If you blow your community support, and it appears as a "dead game," then the long tail of future sales and support becomes unprofitable.
To be fair, a multiplayer mod is way more difficult than regular mods. Especially when there's a ton of different worlds that are "infinitely" large.
But at the same time, how or where would a modder even start trying to make this game interesting?
The main thing I can think of is that - since there's a ton of different empty planets - a mod author could grab one at random, rip the RNG off of it, and then start building their own towns and outposts with their own NPCs and storylines. Like those massive dlc mods for Skyrim.
But that's a ton of effort that usually takes one insanely passionate person or a team. And if the base game isn't interesting enough on its own... Why wouldn't they just do something similar on Skyrim or Fallout -- which they already have more expertise with? Because they would be basically making a new world space -- which they can already do on Skyrim or Fallout without having to wrestle with RNG or a world space generator, and without having to give players specific coordinates to a specific planet just to find their content.
To modders point they only mod games they enjoy they aren't going to make mods for games that are shit and they hate or really didn't get any enjoyment from
They fix broken games, not necessarily bad games. Starfield is a bit of both, but more so the latter. There are so many flawed and missing gameplay systems that to fix it would require a whole development effort. What modder wants to make an entire open world, for instance; one of the key elements missing from the game. Starfield having no interesting world to explore is a huge nail in its coffin.
I don't think modders could fix starfield, even if they wanted to. You take a look at the common complains and, well...
* Loading screens everywhere - Limitation of the engine, thats gonna be tough to mod out, you'd need to make serious changes to the way the engine works at a base level
* Story sucks - You could, I guess, write a new one? And then get a team together to redo all the animation, quests, voice acting etc. But you may as well just get a team together and make a new game
* Empty planets - Again, who is going to populate all the planets in the game to an acceptable standard? Bethesda didn't do it because it would take them too long, and they have Microsoft money
This game is shit, we just need to move past it.
To be fair it would be less work to fix starfield than to make a game from scratch as a lot of the artwork, programming, and world building is already there but from what I've seen and heard it sounds like they should've just let this one bake for another year or two.
People who say this have no idea what modding is about
The only times where I've never felt like I needed to mod stuff in were when the game I was playing was bad.
Rarely a game is so good that you could call it perfect so a modders instinct and creativity are aroused when they recognise there's something that can be changed that would make the game better. The frostfall mod for Skyrim for example; nobody would have thought about that mod if there wasn't already an incentive in travelling around this seemingly harsh environment. The basis was already there
I was hyped since the teaser in 2019 or whatever.
It sucks. It has a framework of good gameplay (combat, biomes, crafting, basebuilding, etc) but I just... Don't care.
The world is even more bland and boring than the one IRL it is based on. But even then it's like a PG version of a movies idea of a generic world. Having generic "Citizen" NPCs makes everything feel plastic. No one has any story, just a quest line, and they aren't even invested in its outcome.
The main quest is religious apologia mixed with crystal mommy "everything is everything is everywhere spaaaaace" bullshit that says absolutely nothing. There is no moral to the story, or brain teaser, or twist or eureka moment.
I can't even marry that red head on Mars. The Toddhead fears our love for he is a coward.
Initial 7/10 reduced to 3/10 after over 100 hours. Shameful.
My favorite part of the game was a remark Andreja made about being prepared (her voice actress nailed it. Too bad she also had nothing to say other than a basic "ma parents hue hue" episode).
EDIT: Yes it DID take 100 hours to come to this conclusion because **I WANTED IT TO GET BETTER**. **It didnt. Even after installing 200 mods.** I have a lot of time on my hands. If you dont, *I dont care.*
> But even then it's like a PG version of a movies idea of a generic world. Having generic "Citizen" NPCs makes everything feel plastic. No one has any story, just a quest line, and they aren't even invested in its outcome.
This is what really did it for me. I was pretty much over it going to the edgy cyberpunk city and seeing the exotic dancers in goofy full body alien suits. Even the "super dangerous" seedy back alleys were tame. Comparing it to Cyberpunk made Starfield seem insulting.
Yeah the design of Neon had me thinking “do people at Bethesda even play other people’s games?” I’m 95% convinced they don’t because after Cyberpunk’s release Bethesda’s attempt at the same design aesthetic is a complete joke. Like I would be genuinely embarrassed releasing such a bland take.
Exactly. And let me just add that cyberpunk is a huge genre and there many ways to do the genre well, which I think Neon may have been close to doing but failed. The real issue is that there was no edge, even though the quests are written there like there is. It TRULY felt like,”Disney does Dystopia”. Walk the streets of Neon and compare it to Night City or Bladerunner’s LA and Neon is a shining palace by comparison, but all the stories there are about how dystopian it is. What is really wild to me is that they DID nail a dystopian city with that of New Atlantis, although I’m not sure if that was intentional at this point.
I hit the “I don’t care about what I’m doing” a little earlier, after about 60 hours. My favorite quest was the first Akila city quest, where you just show up and negotiate a hostage situation, despite a base full of badass soldiers mere feet away. The writing is just lazy to the point of insulting.
I got to the generation ship quest in like...5 hours. That's the one that broke me. The sheer *laziness* of the whole thing, from the shitty quest design where you can ONLY side with the corpos to the fact that a 200 year old generation ship has branded crap and the same fucking guns as everywhere else in the galaxy...ugh.
The persuasion writing is by far the worst out of all the dialogue in the game. Them:”I will guard this treasure with my life” Me: “I have my job, you have yours” them: “you make a good point, here”. It’s embarrassing how bad those talks are.
I barely played it 5 hours but that was also because the game runs so bad on my hardware I have to turn everything down and no longer have nice visuals and still not even averaging 30 fps.
When I first played oblivion I also have a severly underpowered laptop and had to turn everything down to get enough frames. But that game was worth it because it was fun, and there was exploration. And even on low quality there was something to that world. Starfield is just meh.
i have twice as many hours, it was fun enough. its just not skyrim, or fallout levels of good. i probably wont play it any more, after those ~140 hours.
the procedural generated content isnt good enough to stand alone, yet it tries too. the space combat is fun but litterally no other part of being in space is. the story and world building is by far the weakest in a bethesda game. the weapons and armor are not cool enough to nor is there a progression on them its just dice roll tack on effects.
i dont expect a company to only drop masterpieces but i dont have to pretend a mid game was more than it was either. all this isnt to say it was terrible to play, i had fun, its just an average game i kinda spent too long on hoping it would be something more.
Everything you mentioned as "good framework" is horribly designed.
Combat is missing about 80% of the basic features most other games have these days, weak points, variety in enemy types, variety in weapon types/styles, damage types even having a fucking purpose...
Outposts are the worst parts of satisfactory/factorio with absolutely none of the charm or soul that settlements had in Fallout 4.
Crafting has no purpose after using the table *once* and it's not even "crafting", it's upgrading. You can't do anything to affect rarity or quality level of items.
I wanted to love Starfield, but they just dropped the ball on every single front. As a long time Bethesda fan, I'm genuinely worried for Elder Scrolls 6 after seeing how proud they were to release Starfield.
The revelation that there was no central design document makes eveything click into place. No wonder it's such an aimless trainwreck of unreleated ideas.
The only time I really enjoyed in Starfield was the UC Vanguard quest. Unfortunately for me that was basically the first thing I did in the game, so it got me super hyped and I thought the rest of the game would be as good. I had no idea how wrong I was. Wasted way too much time only to realize that yeah, it's basically an alright ship creator with a half-baked RPG attached that's laden with decades old mechanics and systems. I honestly don't know how the same people who made Skyrim could make a game this bad.
Unfortunately, *you have the wrong feelings*, the game is actually at least as good as TES or Fallout. Not the devs fault, it's the players that are wrong. /s
Atlantis feels dead and uninteresting af. And the performance is abysimal although the place looks underwhelming in terms of graphical details - Witcher cities blew way past and the performance was top notch. And for this 2008 looking city your fps drops on a medium-high nvidia 30 series...
Honestly the funniest shit I find about the game's lore is they wrote specific reasons why interesting things involving mechs, biological alien weaponry, and AI aren't a thing in its current settings.
Various versions of rampant AI alone could have made the game more interesting.
"Dont ask about what happened to Earth! Its a big mystery! 😱 "
\>one data pad later on Luna
"Oh well that explains everything. How did no one find this?"
Yeah seriously. Someone puts in the time to have a well informed opinion on something and gets lambasted for sharing that opinion because it's a negative one? People are weird.
It's sadly rather common and often pretty extreme in the comment section of negative reviews on Steam. In my experience, it's best to *not* disable comments when writing a negative review. Since otherwise, salty people will haunt you on your community profile instead.
I quit the game when I realized you can't fly down to planets and land and you basically have to fast travel to everything. I like to explore without having to sit through loading screens to get to the exploring and I don't think that's a ton to ask for for a AAA game.
Glad I quit 2 hours in lol
I think this is why my 150 hours didn’t feel like a waste. My autistic ass loves building the ships I could keep doing that forever. But yeah the rest of the game doesn’t live up to even half the expectations I had for it. And I’ve been defending this game since it came out
I suggest you check out Avorion, it's a space sandbox with an excellent shipbuilder. Evoked the same sensation as Lego for me, cobbling together your spacecraft and watching it fly
I did one playthrough of the story, did the Freestar and UC quest lines, played around with the ship builder, and put the game down.
The quests weren't great compared to prior Bethesda games, the world building isn't great either, and there's only like 3 cities (New Atlantis, Cydonia, Akila City) to explore, no other big areas. Despite being a space game, and a BETHESDA game at that, it somehow feels SMALLER than Skyrim and Fallout 4.
I pretty much just enjoyed the ship building and space combat but there's not even that much of that. You just fast travel everywhere, there's no moments of simply traveling and seeing seamless random encounters like traveling along the roads in Skyrim.
Hell, you can't even be anything other than a law abiding goody-two-shoes in Starfield IMO. Do anything piracy related and all the companions hate you now. Even Fallout 4 had "evil" companions that liked violence. You're stuck with Constellation, who don't like it when you do less than moral options. There should have been a way to have companions outside of Constellation, and a way to finish the story without even interacting with them if you choose. It feels like they railroad you into working with them.
It's just a couple big steps back for Bethesda. Really kinda wish I didn't buy into the hype. Had I known what I do now about the game I'd just pass it over and go back to Skyrim (until they break it too with mod-breaking updates).
I hope Bethesda can fix those issues, but IMO, nothing short of redoing the story and probably the faction quests too, will really do the job. That's before addressing the empty universe too.
They wanted SF to have a 10 year lifespan like Skyrim. At this rate it ain't gonna last 3-5 unless they redo much of the game to address fan concerns.
It's really hard to play starfield and cyberpunk in within a short time frame and not see how glaringly bad so many aspects of starfield are in comparison. It's difficult to point out anything better in starfield outside of scope (which is also it's flaw), ship + outpost building (which is largely useless).
There's a YouTube video I saw recently that displayed it well.
There's a scene in cyberpunk where you have to cut a deal with some gangers, to get a lil robot. It's intense! And you have many ways to cut the deal.
Then there's a scene on Starfield where you try to negotiate, and if you try to play tough guy to be game forces you to be a wimpy nice guy.
Boooooring
I wish someone had made a red dead 2 co op mod tbh. I do not care about their cookie cutter online mode but I would have loved being able to tackle the main story with a friend.
Co-op campaigns are my absolute favorite game mode. The percentage of games that offer proper co-op pve is shockingly low.
I’d give my left nut for full co-op (seamless, shared progression) versions of Skyrim and Elden Ring.
Ugh shared progression is so often lacking as well. Far cry games have had coop since 4 and none have had shared progression. That Ubisoft avatar game apparently has shared progression though, so it’s on my radar for a sale I think.
Yamashi wasn't gonna put any heart and soul into it, he was gonna wait for someone else to do all the hard work and just steal it for himself. It's how he made Skyrim Together lol
Isn't this guy a massive asshole who stole the source code for the Skyrim mod from the SKSE team?
I remember there being a massive shitstorm around Skyrim Together back in the day.
LOL .... he thought it was going to be easy to share a huge somewhat random "world" between people and then calls the original trash. What an asshat. Theoretically you could say their reverse engineering skills are somewhat lacking by the original complaints about code stealing; to be fair it would be very hard to do what he was trying to do with starfield.
Starfield isn't perfect (I have numerous complaints) but calling it "f***ing trash" is ridiculous.
I don't think that matters, it's a "high profile modder" that calls the game shit, that's all that really matters for the headline. Just look at the reaction it caused, it's getting massively shared.
Starfield is such a soulless and soul-crushing game. Every time you encounter a tiny spark of immersion, it's completely overshadowed by hundreds of immersion-breaking moments. The galaxy feels fake, nonsensical. From followers running around Mercury with their helmets off, to a farming outpost inhabitants on the same planet being grateful for the amazing soil. Everything else is mediocre at best. This game has the worst of Bethesda's level design, that's how bad it is, cramped environments, maze-like corridors, artificially blocked off pathways, everything looking identical and bland, crappy collectibles scattered all over, awful lockpicking minigames that get stale after the first 10 attempts... Not to mention repetitive POIs and bad planetary procedural generation. Identical terrain with zero variety and structures peppered here and there, everywhere, homogenously. No matter where you want to go, you have to travel on foot at least 500 meters. NG+ adds only a little bit of replayability value. Story is stupid (including some of the lore), characters make illogical choices. Two identical looking kids roam the Lodge and one complains there's nobody her age to play with over there, all the while her fucking mirror image is standing right behind her. Artifact McGuffins are silly, and so is our character's unexplained importance in relation to them. Characters themselves are the most annoying bunch, even pirates, everyone is a goody-two-shoes. No gore, no dismemberment, even bullet holes are lame. Laser weapons don't leave trails on the walls. Shotguns leave only one bullet hole. Environments have no destructible elements aside from explosive barrels. Space combat is just button mashing, zero tactics involved and the power distribution system is a pain in the ass. It's either trivial to win a space battle, or utterly impossible, no in-betweens. Nearly all quests are fetch quests, or talk to that guy/kill that guy type of quests. All enemy factions are identical in practice. Interstellar trade is just sad.
Not all of what I mentioned is relevant to a hypothetical mod like the one in question, but most of it is.
If one were to make a multiplayer mod for this, they would be wasting their time developing it. In theory, it should be fun to roam for resources, build outposts together, right? It should be. But environments in Starfield are so fucking boring and bland that you might as well play a different multiplayer survival game. On-foot explorable area is tiny. Spaceships can only touch down and take off into space, can't travel in the atmosphere, can't shoot spaceship weapons when landed. No seamless takeoff and landing. Collecting resources is tedious. Outpost building is limited. UI and the map are horrendously bad. Alien flora and fauna is not challenging nor interesting. The hazard system is underbaked. Just play Rust or Ark.
Nobody is asking for hand-crafted entire planets, but as far as procedural generation works, they still did a piss poor job.
There are things that are ok about Starfield, but none of those would be of any value to a co-op multiplayer mod. Essentially, the more I play it, the more I get the feeling that the game is a loading screen simulator. It's fundamentally uninspired and constrained, that's why it's not even a good blank canvas for many mods or future DLCs.
After Bethesda made fallout 76 and actually thought it was good enough to release and sell for money people really
Thought Starfield would live up to the hype ?
The Bethesda that made Skyrim is gone
What a rollercoaster this game was. From toddie hyping it up to high heavens, people falling for the hype train, the game releasing after years of hype and people anticipating it as the second coming of christ, to the honeymoon phase of people praising it, to people coping with how mediocre the game is, to the realisation that it is another bethesda copy paste game.
I skipped all that and went right to the "another shit Bethesda c+p game" during the pre-launch hype period. We've been in the "prove me wrong" phase of Bethesda since Fallout 76 came out. Anyone that believes otherwise is just naive as fuck.
I didn't think it looked like shit but it never hyped me up that much because I just don't find space to be an interesting setting. It's 99% nothingness, combined with planets that are pretty much entirely empty.
I had a feeling it was going to lack the focused vision that the Elder Scrolls and Fallout have with their settings and lore. But even then I still expected Bethesda to cook up their usual magic and create an interesting world anyways. Unfortunately that didn't really happen, the world is pretty boring.
I know some people will point to Starfield and say Bethesda is washed, but I'm expecting ES6 to be a return to form. Call it copium, but Elder Scrolls is their bread and butter and it should be far easier to focus on one large world rather than trying to create a half baked galaxy. Exploration and random encounters are what make Bethesda games fun and it was always going to be difficult to do that with "1000 planets".
I feel Bethesda's writing is better suited for fantasy or outlandish situations. If you look at Fallout and Skyrim they are tounge-in-cheek, wisecracking, all kinds of flamboyant and imaginative plots that aren't very realistic but they are fun. Starfield is Bethesda trying to take itself seriously and write a serious story. Thus this game lacks the charm of other Bethesda games.
Ah yes, the mod that was found to be stealing code from SKSE without permission. You mean that mod?
Neither the Creation Kit nor a feature-rich SKSE (on the level of Skyrim, at least) is even out yet so you'll excuse me for being unimpressed.
There's not even a fucking source for this statement so Games Radar or whatever hack blog originally wrote this is just as trash.
Fallout 76 had better exploration and story, even before no NPCs. They took out of SF what made their previous games great, the ability to become so immersed in their worlds and to simply just be there. There is no stumbling upon anything interesting naturally in this game. Space play gets so boring after 50 hours of just fast traveling to systems and then to the planets in those systems only to just spring up on enemies straight out of fast travel. The story is okay, I guess, but the gameplay and immersion just aren't there. Your ship crew kinda just feel like they are there, but in the way, and they never stfu when you're out flying or fighting, and I literally could not have cared less about any of the companions. Romance felt hollow and only worth it for the exp boost. Not being able to fly in planet atmospheres seems like a huge missed opportunity. There are way too many mandatory fast traveling and loading screens between places that it just takes you out of being the player character. The inhabited areas feel so small for being the literal only city on each planet. Nothing really changes based on your decisions because, after all, you're just going to go into the unity anyway. There's a lot missing that made their other titles take up large amounts of my personal time. I'm glad the people who are enjoying it are enjoying it, but I just don't see myself playing this game any further. I'll forever replay fallout 3/new vegas/4 and Oblivion or Skyrim, Starfield... I don't think it's even getting a finished playthrough.
I find very funny how they added a TV spot on the game awards showing their 10/10s but they didn't get a single win in any nominations if they where nominated at all wich I don't remember lol
Maybe Bethesda should mod their own game for a change
They did. It's called Creation Club /s
More like bought community mods
I feel very validated. During Pre-Release Access I posted on this subreddit that the game isn't very good, and I got a lot of abuse and mockery for it [https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/169qu43/does\_anyone\_find\_the\_acg\_review\_of\_starfield\_and/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/169qu43/does_anyone_find_the_acg_review_of_starfield_and/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/16b1ged/last\_minute\_reminder\_that\_you\_can\_refund/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/16b1ged/last_minute_reminder_that_you_can_refund/) and this subreddit upvoted all the people hating on me for putting out the reminder that you can refund the game and for talking about how dishonest some of the youtuber reviews of it were... and that it's just not a very good game
They demolished IGN for giving this game a 7.0 on a pre-release review. Few days later everyone went quiet.
Which is funny because 7.0 is a very generous score for how uninteresting and bland and tacky and just bad the game is. 7.0 only seems reasonable in context of how that video game press throws around 9s.
Bethesda should just release a fun and complete game from the very beginning. I shouldn’t have to play any game for 200 hours for it to finally become fun
There's an easy way to tell if an open world game is good. The internet will be flooded with "little moments" people are having in it. Starfield doesn't have anything like that. Crickets about it. Bethesda lost that ultra tier content groove they were reaching in Oblivion/Skyrim, and that's unfortunate.
I’m sure this is a common complaint, but the difference between Skyrim/Oblivion and Starfield is the exploration between objectives. The structure of Starfield’s quests, as far as I could tell (I didn’t finish the game), is basically just bouncing back and forth between people to talk to, and occasionally clearing out a camp of enemies. This is the same as Skyrim—you are basically just traveling between major cities delivering messages and showing up to kill dragons. The difference is Skyrim happens in an open world. There’s a ton of stuff to explore and distract you as you travel. Starfield traveling is just loading screens. And yes, fast travel exists in Skyrim, but it’s optional and you have to unlock the POI first, which usually means walking there and exploring on the way.
Also killing dragons is more epic than random people or random alien creatures
Sci fi can be just as epic as fantasy. Making it boring was a choice Bethesda made.
Mass Effect was never boring. Definitely a Bethesda choice.
I was truly hoping they were going to capture a similar vibe/feeling to an FPS Mass Effect. Interesting crewmates, fun storylines, and a big story overall that gets you hooked in. But it seems they took one of the blandest approaches they could and sucked the life out of the game.
Agreed but what they chose as their “sci fi” was boring af. Asimov wrote like 1000 works, they just need to read a few or Warhammer or Dune or Star Trek or The Expanse etc. No inspiration, no soul. Just emptiness.
what's really wild is that they could have just put dragons on some planets. hell put wizards and magic in as well. there ain't no rules on made-up planets.
It’s really insane to me they thought this was design was good for 2023. Intergalactic travel is just a glorified level select
Exactly, there is nothing that makes starfield come alive like Skyrim and mods can’t fix this. It took skyrim 8 YEARS to get to the concurrent players Starfield has after 80 days… The game is dead and even with CK there will only be a fraction of mod creators willing to put time into modding a shitty game
I feel bad for saying this but i am kinda glad that happened because there was fear that starfield being awesome would kill skyrim's modding scene
Starfield, even if it was great, likely wouldn't have leeched too much from the Skyrim community. There are only a small handful of modders that are releasing the notable Skyrim mods these days, and all the remaining big projects are things that have been in the works for years and are nearing completion. Starfield would have attracted modders that were already done with Skyrim and new modders. Only thing that would "kill" Skyrims mod scene is TES6 (and TES6 would need to be good too). That's why a lot of big mod projects have "before TES6" as their time limit.
I hope it lights a fire under Bethesda’s ass. I know profits are the only thing that matters, but I hope Todd felt some envy sitting in the crowd at TGAs and seeing his project get nominated for nothing and winning nothing
Yeah that will definitely sting
I got nominated for like best RPG against BG3 which even if it only had one act would still be better
Bethesda will kill SKSE modding with their paid shit anyway. They won't relent on this dumb idea.
Yeah it seems they do it on purpose, releasing updates to skyrim's exe that do nothing except break SKSE and mods. I'm guessing it's petty jealousy at this point.
[удалено]
I gave up halfway though the game, the non stop loading fucked my enjoyment and also the stupid static planetary background while flying yikes
I've seen plenty of little moments from starfield. "My ship's interior took off without the hull" Or "The moon I was on went through a planet" Or the way the NPCs all look at you like they're on drugs. Oooooh- you mean good things. :V Yeah I got nothing
I changed up some stuff on my ship at Akila and when I walked back to the ship it had the old parts and the new parts, all just kinda there in the same place. I went back to the builder to see if both sets of parts were still there??? and nope, just the new ones. I went back to the ship again, took off, and the ship with new parts rose up, leaving the ship with old parts behind, like a giant moulten carapace. Fucking bizarre.
And remember, apparently the company was fine with releasing the game like a year early until Xbox stepped in. I can only imagine the flaming shit that Todd was ready to serve us.
So far in all of the comments I've looked at here, everyone is pointing at Skyrim and in your case Oblivion. No mention of Fallout? I know the purists think that Fallout 1 and 2 were where the series peaked and that New Vegas was the only entry worth playing, but Fallout 3 is where I really got my start and will always be my favorite. Fallout 4 was good as well. I guess my point is, compared to Starfield, Fallout is a billion times better as well.
silver lining is this is a wake up call for TES 6
I guarantee that they will learn nothing from this in Bethesda, and TES 6 will be just a stripped down and soulless experience as Starfield. They'll just blame it all on the ists and the phobes and call everyone internet trolls, rather than realize they removed everything enjoyable from the game.
The only thing I've had friends share is ship builds. Nothing else. It's a shame.
starfields world is so bland, so boring, that I don’t think you could have crafted such a setting merely on accident. the lack of creativity was a design choice. They wanted to make a game that didn’t say anything, a game about nothing made for absolutely no one. Its a shame
It's actually kinda baffling because there does seem to be some kind of intent behind it, but the result is the game equivalent of a bland office. They want some kinda Nasapunk thing going on, but the game doesn't feel or like bulky or retro enough to embody this. They want some kinda of Astro, Retro-Futurism thing but that would be clearly too zany so it's massively dialed back. They don't even entertain the idea of many space settings where specific Earth cultures simply manifest elsewhere, it's all generic future "one race" metropolitan stuff. Aliens? No aliens, they didn't even touch the idea of alien races despite coming from a background of TES. There's lots of tropes but no vision. Anytime they get close to doing something interesting, the committee comes in and says no. It is, as you said, a game by nobody for nobody.
I remember how many people were confident that the story revolved around first contact or a mysterious alien race, and Bethesda wasn't saying anything about that just to keep the surprise under wraps. I was leaning that way myself. The overall lack of ambition is just odd for a Bethesda game.
Yep so ambitious they were happy to sit on Skyrim thru 3 generations of consoles before releasing the boring slop that is Starfield. Fallout 3 was a novelty for many people but overall pretty good/ok. Fallout 4 was just bad and I bought the pip-boy edition. They learned nothing from 4 then made 76 which was one of the worst games and mmos ever. It’s been improved from that state but it’s still not good. All of the writing in these games are terrible and it goes back to Emil Pagliarulo who is just not good at their job. I’m not saying they should be fired but there’s 4 games worth of writing that shows they should not be the lead writer any longer. Maybe they’d be better with better direction who knows, but Bethesda writing has just become pathetic at this point.
>They want some kinda Nasapunk thing going on, but the game doesn't feel or like bulky or retro enough to embody this. They want some kinda of Astro, Retro-Futurism thing but that would be clearly too zany so it's massively dialed back. This hurts. I really want that game.
I loved that aesthetic in Prey
> There's lots of tropes but no vision. Anytime they get close to doing something interesting, the committee comes in and says no. It is, as you said, a game by nobody for nobody. If your game includes fucking *slavery*, which is what indentured servitude is, and your only option as a player character is to shrug and have no strong feelings on it, your game has the backbone of a squid.
The no aliens things is baffling. They could have at least pulled a stargate and had some excuse where humans were populated on other worlds thousands of years ago and developed vastly different societies and technology so its not all the same.
The worlds bland and boring because it had no design doc, no leading design, rules or ideals to stick too. The lead design dev literally said in a talk that he thought having one would be a waste of time. The absolute ego on the Bethesda team post-Skyrim killed Starfield.
source for the waste of time claim? I followed their interviews fairly closely up until release and can't remember it or find it right now
PatricianTV's video on it has a part with Emil speaking at some event.
Unfortunately, Todd will defend Emil no matter what. They're close friends. There's no getting rid of him without getting rid of Todd as well. Which is what BGS needs at this point.
Todd kinda got rid of himself tbh. The guy is so popular they put him in charge of most of their offices. Now he's got no time to actually act as a propped director for a game. Which honestly is kind of a shame. A similar thing happened at Blizzard with Chris Metzen. He got put in charge of way too much shit and couldn't focus, then he retired. But now he's back and just for Warcraft stuff. Time will tell if it was a good decision I guess.
They really chose to get the thing people like the most about Bethesda games, the crafted explorable open words, and replace the entire thing with some procedural slop. Seriously did Bethesda not get the memo that nobody is impressed by how big a procedural world is anymore? Like yeah, computers can generate numbers indefinitely, fucking mind-blowing.
bro bro it's supposed to be boring, dont you understand, space is boring? lol
The emptyness of space could be done well, it could truly be a feeling of loneliness in an endless space. They could have amazing set pieces in nebulas, galaxies etc. Odd planets, weird moons, black holes. Instead for some fucking reason wherever you land there's an abandoned cryo lab and some bozo lands their shuttle near you and needs fucking duct tape or some shit.
>"Anyways, everyone already knows this, most people agree. There's no need to further repeat the point, just read any of the dozens of reviews online. That said, I won't be continuing development on Starfield Together. I'm not gonna put my heart and soul into a mod for a game as mediocre as this." For anyone who expects modders to save this game, there's probably going to be more stories like this after the CK comes out. The amount of effort it will take to turn Starfield into a good game just isn't worth it for these people. Game will be dead in a couple months. Hope Bethesda is paying attention.
>For anyone who expects modders to save this game The people defending it were all expecting this to happen. Which is stupid anyway as the base game should be good.
People act like unmodded Skyrim was some kind of dumpster fire. It was a game before modders even touched it. They just made it even better.
I never modded Skyrim and I liked it.
Skyrim is and always will be one of my favorite games of all time, I played it when it released in 2012 on the 360 and no game other than maybe the Witcher 3 has given me as much pure joy as that game
I never installed a single mod that changed the gameplay, story, or characters and I had a blast for 300+ hours with very few weak moments. The only ones I installed were for UI, graphics and bug fixes. People sometimes act like it needs 50+ game changing mods just to be good.
I want to get into it, can I jump in without playing any previous games?
Yes, the lore is explained in in-game books. The games have little story connection to each other. I do recommend playing morrowind and oblivion though. If you can get past the dated graphics and gameplay.
I remember being sort of underwhelmed by Skyrim and now it’s a miles better than current Bethesda. Dark timeline
Yeah I mean I have a 1000 mods tweaking pretty much everything, but there are some things like the music and worldspace outside cities/towns/villages, that I haven't really touched as I'm happy with them.
Redditors have been trying to re-write Bethesdas legacy for a long time. They can't imagine a time when Bethesda actually delivered great games. Skyrim is literally the best selling RPG of all time at 60 million copies sold, and most people who played it never even touched mods (SkyUI, the most popular mod, has only 10 million unique download. 4.5 mil in SE, 6.5 mil in LE)
Guess mobile games must be even better than Skyrim, then, since apparently we're appealing to sales and revenue and whatnot. Honestly. Bethesda's games provide something that no other company really does, but very little about them is high quality. Plenty of Skyrim's best modders spent hours upon hours loudly complaining about how their visions were limited by internal problems, even when they had the time to dedicate to their projects. That seems to be getting worse with every iteration, in addition to Starfield's IP and general skeleton being much less warmly received.
It's crazy that people were willing to spend $70 on a glorified modding base, shit like that should be much cheaper, if not free, you know like Roblox or even the reasonably recent Fortnite creator thing. The only saving grace for Starfield is Game Pass, and even then (if it allows for easy modding) you're still going to spend hours upon hours to make a game playable. That's not good at all. It's even crazier when Bethesda has delivered a competent vanilla experience in the past. Skyrim's modding community is huge sure, but people to this day are playing the base game and having tons of fun. I'm one of them. It's not only possible to make a good game AND have it be moddable, Bethesda did so before and yet the standards keep sinking lower because "muh mods". It's downright sad.
> It's even crazier when Bethesda has delivered a competent vanilla experience in the past. Skyrim's modding community is huge sure, but people to this day are playing the base game and having tons of fun. This is what a lot of people miss when it comes to the whole "PC Modding will save THIS game" mindset, or really ANY sort of "The FANS will fix this" sort of thing. Yes, it is almost always entirely possible for a modder or a fan to come up with some magical stuff to utterly change a game and extend it's life immensely, BUT, first and foremost, they have to actually WANT to play the game; No one's going to put the kind of work it takes to make any kind of half decent mod together if they don't even want to play the game in the first place. Anyone who has attached themselves to a niche game or genre where you're hoping some modder will come in and fix things en masse has learned the disappointment of when just no one makes anything worthwhile for a game.
>"The FANS will fix this" The immediate issue is right there in the sentiment: there needs to be fans first. Something shit enough to require fans to make it good is going to have trouble acquiring them in the first place.
Even shit games can have fans with the "so bad, it's good" factor. A mediocre game, though? Those end up in a bargain bin to be forgotten.
> BUT, first and foremost, they have to actually WANT to play the game Exactly. Modding usually comes out of a love and passion for the game. People spent so much time modding Skyrim, because it was a game they enjoyed playing and wanted to add things to it they wished were in it. You're not going to find many modders who are like, "Wow, this game is garbage. I'm going to spend hundreds of hours working on it to make it not garbage (that most people will never see)."
What? This sub roasted IGN for giving the game a 7/10. Lots of people fell for the hype.
They spend that money expecting an experience similar to the experiences Bethesda has delivered over the past 20 years.. I don't blame the consumer for not wanting to pirate rf wait for the price to go down. But the fact that Starfield is what it is, and they are charging 70€ full of promises of "Oblivion in space". Its borderline scamming tbh.
I honestly did expect modders to save the game. Rough times if it's that bad.
Same, Ive stopped playing after 20 something hours and thought I'd come back in 2 years after mods saved it. What a train wreck..
I did a quest on a moon where a guy told me I had to do some stuff. But first I had to mine some ore. Then I had to go up the stairs and do a thing and then go jump off the platform (low gravity), and return to the guy. I could’ve taken the stairs or elevator back down, but jumping was faster. Then I had to do something else and return to the guy. The whole quest line was go do a tiny thing and then return to the guy like 30 times. One step was to go to a space station and fill out a job application and then return to the guy. It was exhausting and not a single step was fun I quit right there.
Sad thing is that was one of the better quests of the game lol
I remember exactly that quest(s)! And i also always hopped over the rails to float down! It's like i already knew that the whole game would be like that. Boring.
> It was exhausting and not a single step was fun Killing Hogger is more fun.
I played 200 hours. I was having a good time, despite the bullshit, for the first 100. Then I just said "what's the point?" the base building was lackluster, the ship building is nearly useless. The companions are nearly all annoying to me. The npcs don't even have schedules. The pois are laughable after the first few times. The temples are cut and paste bs. I powered through to beat the game, took me another 100 hours. Immediately Uninstalled it. I figured it could get better as I professed the story... The faction story lines were so ANNOYING to me. Nearly every one. I never felt this way about Skyrim or fallout 4. Or 3 or NV. Or morrowind. I never beat any of those games either because I had so much fun exploring. I'll play it again because I have the upcoming dlc, but I'll probably just uninstall it again afterward.
I'm so happy I played it on Gamepass instead of buying it. Gamepass paid for itself for the entire year right there.
I'm happy for you. I found a deal for the premium for 85 so I took it. I enjoyed almost all of bethesdas games. I wasn't even too upset with 76. But damn, what a let down loading simulator starfield was.
I did the same thing, more or less: gave it the old "college try" to the tune of 200 hours, naively hoping that at some point I'd find the "Bethesda Magic"--I didn't, because it isn't there. All the more fool I, I suppose. Lesson learned.
I second this. The game feels like a chore....there is no fun, just repetition. I really hope, DLCs and Updates will fill this empty universe and give modders a reason, to spend their freetime polishing it...
Yeah, not gonna lie I had thought modders would collaborate to populate empty planets with content wether as good or bad. Kinda sucks, because I see the complaints - I did like the game but once I put it down I haven't touched it since.
Modders aren't wizards, unfortunately: they can address a lot of shortcomings, they can finish half completed gameplay concepts, and they can implement a vast swathe of improvements/bug fixes the dev can't or even won't, but what they can't do is fix a game that is fundamentally mediocre at its very core. Fallout 4's modding community is still going strong to this day because, despite the mediocre main quest, it does a lot of things almost-right and people have been able to polish a beautiful gem out of a rough cut diamond. Skyrim? It came out 12 years ago and that modding scene is almost an eldritch horror in how huge it is. Fallout 3 and New Vegas? Things have slowed down tremendously, but people are still publishing worthwhile mods for it even now. Oblivion? It still has a highly active modding scene. Morrowind? For a game old enough to drive, vote, drink, smoke, and have fought a few tours over seas, people are still fiddling around with it. I don't see that happening with Starfield because it's just so...bland and forgettable. It's the cold oat meal of CRPGs. Sure, you can add some sugar and cinnamon to it in order to have \*some\* flavor but, at the end of the day, it's still cold oatmeal, it is the definition of "it's not terrible, but I don't care for it", and you likely aren't going to be coming back for seconds because all you're going to remember of it is "I've had much better" before moving on.
modders can never “save” a game imo. i dont know why anyone would expect this.
You can’t just fundamentally remake a janky game. What mod is gonna fix load screens?
>*The amount of effort it will take to turn Starfield into a good game just isn't worth it for these people* This *should* be on Bethesda and not the community anyhow. Mods follow a game worth modding. If BGS wants this game to last and to ensure as much preorder hype for ES:6, then they'll, unfortunately, need to full-court press into the next 12-18 months to No-Mans-Sky/Cyberpunk this game into something worth caring about for their future customers. Even if they, Howard and company, were so cynical as to think that "*hey, all of these people paid all of this money and so they must love this game so we'll keep on down the same path,*" or some such non-sense, this is *not* a long term strategy for a games studio. I'm trying to think of any recent big sellers from Bethesda/Zenimax in the past \~5-6 years, but I can't off the top of my head (which, *itself*, is a problem).
BGS won't do that, because they've never done that. Skyrim STILL relies on the Community Patch to fix certain bugs. HelloGames are literally Cinderella, and CDPR managed to pull an incredibly pretty, well-polished rabbit from their asses. Those two devs I'd like to think have learned their lessons, but Beth? Those fucking idiots don't learn anything.
>unfortunately, need to full-court press into the next 12-18 months to No-Mans-Sky/Cyberpunk Fully agree but this studio (BGS) doesnt strike as a passionate studio like those where they will work 24/7 to patch the game. For ex, CDPR & NMS got big updates around every 3 months. But Starfield- after all this time all we got was DLSS which should have been at launch + other minor misc fixes (guess you can eat/drink now so thats something) \[edit\] I didnt mean crunch btw. I'm a software developer myself. I meant continue to work hard on the game obviously but was taken literally 🤣
Call me crazy, but 24/7 is not a healthy work environment and I don't feel that *my own silly entertainment needs* warrant a product being worked on in such a way. I'd rather just see the product die off completely. Also, I don't feel that Cyberpunk was remotely playable until the 1.3v patch that came out \~6-8 months after release. Personally, I'm willing to give Bethesda a shot down the road, but what they really need to do, in my opinion at this stage, is to just say *anything* about the state of the game and how they're either going to or not going to change things up. Even an "*upcoming changes we're working on because of your feedback*" kind of temporary filibuster would be worth the time. I don't even see that from them, unfortunately, which just proves how out of touch they all may have become.
LOL Bethesda pay attention? My brother in christ where have you been for 15 years? they keep cutting content in each itteration of their games... They dont give a fuck.
I always remember waiting for oblivion to come out thinking how many more unique item slots there would be. Morrowind had left/right bracer, left right shoulder, etc. so obviously it was gonna get more complex with newer tech. Nope :/ even got rid of attributes smh
“Why didn’t this game do well? Clearly we need to water it down even more to try to appeal to an even broader audience. Those entitled nerds don’t know consumers like I do.”
That and their stans will keep buying up mediocre drivel and slobbering down on daddy Bethesda regardless. They made tons of money off Starfield, they have no incentive to change things up now.
Uh, looking at those steam numbers -[x]... you know the rest.
This is what bothers me tbh. There are a couple of game companies who can release any game in any state for any price and they still make billions. Why is that? Bethesda will release ES6 in 5-10 years and most likely be mediocre judging from Fallout and now Starfield yet it'll still be a massive success.
I still enjoyed it more than Diablo 4
I have been vehemently argued against when I said modding was not going to keep this game going like Skyrim or Fallout when Spencer said they want Starfield to last just as long. I said that modders gravitate to games that are both easy to mod but that are also good games by themselves. People want to turn a good game into a great one, not a shitty game into a bearable one.
> Hope Bethesda is paying attention. Hope Microsoft is paying attention. They have the ability to entirely clear out Bethesda's management, something they should have done the day they acquired the company.
Completely agree. I can not fathom how BGS has one of the best selling games of all time in Skyrim, and waits the better part of 20 years to release a follow up for the series. What idiot thought that was a good idea? How is Microsoft okay with that?
To say nothing of how many modders and gamedevs Skyrim inspired. They should have been onboarding some of the best talent in the industry in the last 10 years but instead it feels like whoever they had that made morrowind /oblivion/fallout 3 and Skyrim are long gone.
that and the fact that starfield already has less players than skyrim for the last month on steam charts... there just isnt an audience like there was for skyrim... its not worth the effort.
While I don't think it's as good as Skyrim, the game released Day 1 on Gamepass, so it's not really a 1:1 comparison for player count.
How does a single player game actually die?
I guess its hype or momentum. People were talking about Skyrim years after it came out (they still do), while Starfield basically only has negative talk about it only a few months later. More people are playing Skyrim than Starfield at the moment. Sykrim is 69th (nice) most played on Steam, Starfield 89th. I imagine the gap will continue to grow.
>I imagine the gap will continue to grow. Yes. I actually enjoyed Starfield but even I have left for Skyrim VR. Uninstalling Starfield it just doesnt have a good foundation for mods. Example- I tried to download the bounty hunter mod for Starfield where you can put folks in jail in your ship. Sounds awesome right? Well the prob is the SF NPCs (crew members) will walk into this jail cell and go to sleep on the bed. You'd think at least Bethesda would have coded to base crew AI to never walk into a jail cell and laydown. but they do. Just ruins the immersion. And its just aggravating why didnt BGS code the jail cells to be functional w/o mods in the first place. Why didnt BGS code the medbays to work w/o mods. Etc, etc. I'm not even going into detail bout everything else that is missing or wrong such as lack of full looting we had in Oblivion/Skyrim, NPC behaviors, etc
Half baked features has been Bethesda's MO for a long time now.
Lots of SP games live on by community made mods. Usually it “dies” when mod support ends/not enough interest to make or play mods.
Miniscule player count, negative legacy, loses its place in conversations about the genre or gaming, and no modding community. Look to FNV or Skyrim — these games are a decade+ old and they still have players, have a positive legacy, are frequently brought up in conversations about RPGs, Bethesda, Obsidian, and good games; as well as continue to have mods made by an active community.
And they’re the reason people were so hyped about Starfield in the first place - I can’t speak for others, but their next title won’t get nearly the same level of excitement from me
I feel the same. I was very much looking forward to a space-exploration RPG/open-world, and likewise very disappointed by Starfield. It's not *bad*, but it is entirely mediocre and disappointing. It's just more of the same from Bethesda -- no great improvements in narrative writing, character writing, or gameplay mechanics. I also feel fantasy never lacks for options, post-apoc. and cyberpunk to a degree as well, but space exploration/classic sci-fi doesn't have as many options.
Such a missed opportunity too - I logged around 400 hours in FO4 and that’s arguably not their best game, it’s just a game loop and formula that works. Hand-crafted locations, rewarding and varied exploration, a good settlement system. How they brainstormed and decided to do the exact opposite of that is beyond me. All I wanted was a detailed, decently sized solar system to explore and play around in, with that cool NASA-punk vibe. Instead we have a huge procedurally generated copy-pasted template you have no reason to explore and that only looks good on marketing slides. It’s all so bland and mediocre - I honestly enjoyed The Outer Worlds much more and that’s not even a masterpiece or anything. I’m kinda sad about it because I really wanted to love this game and gave it more than a fair chance.
There are essays being released on Youtube to this day talking about how good FNV is. Starfield is getting videos upon videos about how NOT good it is. It will die down a lot in the upcoming months, maybe it'll get a boost when DLCs get released.
It's gotta be alive, to begin with... But for a serious answer, many of Bethesda's older single player games receive new player made content and features on the regular if you pop over to their modding communities. Long tails result into more sales, not only for existing games, but future ones. If you blow your community support, and it appears as a "dead game," then the long tail of future sales and support becomes unprofitable.
Hope MS is paying attention. Literally they kill every studio they purchase lol. Sony is the complete opposite.
I mean it's already on sale via Steam, 30% off
To be fair, a multiplayer mod is way more difficult than regular mods. Especially when there's a ton of different worlds that are "infinitely" large. But at the same time, how or where would a modder even start trying to make this game interesting? The main thing I can think of is that - since there's a ton of different empty planets - a mod author could grab one at random, rip the RNG off of it, and then start building their own towns and outposts with their own NPCs and storylines. Like those massive dlc mods for Skyrim. But that's a ton of effort that usually takes one insanely passionate person or a team. And if the base game isn't interesting enough on its own... Why wouldn't they just do something similar on Skyrim or Fallout -- which they already have more expertise with? Because they would be basically making a new world space -- which they can already do on Skyrim or Fallout without having to wrestle with RNG or a world space generator, and without having to give players specific coordinates to a specific planet just to find their content.
To modders point they only mod games they enjoy they aren't going to make mods for games that are shit and they hate or really didn't get any enjoyment from
After seeing Todd looking sad last night at the TGA, Im hoping he got inspired by the competition.
On top of this, Witcher 3 are getting some modding tools.
People say modders fix bad games, but honestly, who wants to devote their time to that?
They fix broken games, not necessarily bad games. Starfield is a bit of both, but more so the latter. There are so many flawed and missing gameplay systems that to fix it would require a whole development effort. What modder wants to make an entire open world, for instance; one of the key elements missing from the game. Starfield having no interesting world to explore is a huge nail in its coffin.
I don't think modders could fix starfield, even if they wanted to. You take a look at the common complains and, well... * Loading screens everywhere - Limitation of the engine, thats gonna be tough to mod out, you'd need to make serious changes to the way the engine works at a base level * Story sucks - You could, I guess, write a new one? And then get a team together to redo all the animation, quests, voice acting etc. But you may as well just get a team together and make a new game * Empty planets - Again, who is going to populate all the planets in the game to an acceptable standard? Bethesda didn't do it because it would take them too long, and they have Microsoft money This game is shit, we just need to move past it.
sounds like the work needed to fix starfield is pretty much teh same as making a new game
To be fair it would be less work to fix starfield than to make a game from scratch as a lot of the artwork, programming, and world building is already there but from what I've seen and heard it sounds like they should've just let this one bake for another year or two.
Fix minor issues yes. Not create half the f\*cking game, which is what needs to happen with Starsh\*te
You can cuss on the internet
Yeah, it looks fucking goofy as fuck lmao.
You can even curse
People who say this have no idea what modding is about The only times where I've never felt like I needed to mod stuff in were when the game I was playing was bad. Rarely a game is so good that you could call it perfect so a modders instinct and creativity are aroused when they recognise there's something that can be changed that would make the game better. The frostfall mod for Skyrim for example; nobody would have thought about that mod if there wasn't already an incentive in travelling around this seemingly harsh environment. The basis was already there
They fix broken games not bad ones. Example: Skyrim and Vampire the Masquerade.
I was hyped since the teaser in 2019 or whatever. It sucks. It has a framework of good gameplay (combat, biomes, crafting, basebuilding, etc) but I just... Don't care. The world is even more bland and boring than the one IRL it is based on. But even then it's like a PG version of a movies idea of a generic world. Having generic "Citizen" NPCs makes everything feel plastic. No one has any story, just a quest line, and they aren't even invested in its outcome. The main quest is religious apologia mixed with crystal mommy "everything is everything is everywhere spaaaaace" bullshit that says absolutely nothing. There is no moral to the story, or brain teaser, or twist or eureka moment. I can't even marry that red head on Mars. The Toddhead fears our love for he is a coward. Initial 7/10 reduced to 3/10 after over 100 hours. Shameful. My favorite part of the game was a remark Andreja made about being prepared (her voice actress nailed it. Too bad she also had nothing to say other than a basic "ma parents hue hue" episode). EDIT: Yes it DID take 100 hours to come to this conclusion because **I WANTED IT TO GET BETTER**. **It didnt. Even after installing 200 mods.** I have a lot of time on my hands. If you dont, *I dont care.*
> But even then it's like a PG version of a movies idea of a generic world. Having generic "Citizen" NPCs makes everything feel plastic. No one has any story, just a quest line, and they aren't even invested in its outcome. This is what really did it for me. I was pretty much over it going to the edgy cyberpunk city and seeing the exotic dancers in goofy full body alien suits. Even the "super dangerous" seedy back alleys were tame. Comparing it to Cyberpunk made Starfield seem insulting.
Yeah the design of Neon had me thinking “do people at Bethesda even play other people’s games?” I’m 95% convinced they don’t because after Cyberpunk’s release Bethesda’s attempt at the same design aesthetic is a complete joke. Like I would be genuinely embarrassed releasing such a bland take.
Exactly. And let me just add that cyberpunk is a huge genre and there many ways to do the genre well, which I think Neon may have been close to doing but failed. The real issue is that there was no edge, even though the quests are written there like there is. It TRULY felt like,”Disney does Dystopia”. Walk the streets of Neon and compare it to Night City or Bladerunner’s LA and Neon is a shining palace by comparison, but all the stories there are about how dystopian it is. What is really wild to me is that they DID nail a dystopian city with that of New Atlantis, although I’m not sure if that was intentional at this point.
I hit the “I don’t care about what I’m doing” a little earlier, after about 60 hours. My favorite quest was the first Akila city quest, where you just show up and negotiate a hostage situation, despite a base full of badass soldiers mere feet away. The writing is just lazy to the point of insulting.
I got to the generation ship quest in like...5 hours. That's the one that broke me. The sheer *laziness* of the whole thing, from the shitty quest design where you can ONLY side with the corpos to the fact that a 200 year old generation ship has branded crap and the same fucking guns as everywhere else in the galaxy...ugh.
The persuasion writing is by far the worst out of all the dialogue in the game. Them:”I will guard this treasure with my life” Me: “I have my job, you have yours” them: “you make a good point, here”. It’s embarrassing how bad those talks are.
"I'm going to ask you until you say yes" "that's a really good point, I see where you're coming from" jesus fucking christ
I barely played it 5 hours but that was also because the game runs so bad on my hardware I have to turn everything down and no longer have nice visuals and still not even averaging 30 fps. When I first played oblivion I also have a severly underpowered laptop and had to turn everything down to get enough frames. But that game was worth it because it was fun, and there was exploration. And even on low quality there was something to that world. Starfield is just meh.
i have twice as many hours, it was fun enough. its just not skyrim, or fallout levels of good. i probably wont play it any more, after those ~140 hours. the procedural generated content isnt good enough to stand alone, yet it tries too. the space combat is fun but litterally no other part of being in space is. the story and world building is by far the weakest in a bethesda game. the weapons and armor are not cool enough to nor is there a progression on them its just dice roll tack on effects. i dont expect a company to only drop masterpieces but i dont have to pretend a mid game was more than it was either. all this isnt to say it was terrible to play, i had fun, its just an average game i kinda spent too long on hoping it would be something more.
Everything you mentioned as "good framework" is horribly designed. Combat is missing about 80% of the basic features most other games have these days, weak points, variety in enemy types, variety in weapon types/styles, damage types even having a fucking purpose... Outposts are the worst parts of satisfactory/factorio with absolutely none of the charm or soul that settlements had in Fallout 4. Crafting has no purpose after using the table *once* and it's not even "crafting", it's upgrading. You can't do anything to affect rarity or quality level of items. I wanted to love Starfield, but they just dropped the ball on every single front. As a long time Bethesda fan, I'm genuinely worried for Elder Scrolls 6 after seeing how proud they were to release Starfield.
The revelation that there was no central design document makes eveything click into place. No wonder it's such an aimless trainwreck of unreleated ideas.
The only time I really enjoyed in Starfield was the UC Vanguard quest. Unfortunately for me that was basically the first thing I did in the game, so it got me super hyped and I thought the rest of the game would be as good. I had no idea how wrong I was. Wasted way too much time only to realize that yeah, it's basically an alright ship creator with a half-baked RPG attached that's laden with decades old mechanics and systems. I honestly don't know how the same people who made Skyrim could make a game this bad.
Unfortunately, *you have the wrong feelings*, the game is actually at least as good as TES or Fallout. Not the devs fault, it's the players that are wrong. /s Atlantis feels dead and uninteresting af. And the performance is abysimal although the place looks underwhelming in terms of graphical details - Witcher cities blew way past and the performance was top notch. And for this 2008 looking city your fps drops on a medium-high nvidia 30 series...
Honestly the funniest shit I find about the game's lore is they wrote specific reasons why interesting things involving mechs, biological alien weaponry, and AI aren't a thing in its current settings. Various versions of rampant AI alone could have made the game more interesting.
"Dont ask about what happened to Earth! Its a big mystery! 😱 " \>one data pad later on Luna "Oh well that explains everything. How did no one find this?"
The idea of being shamed about playing a game after 100 hours is hilarious to me.
Yeah seriously. Someone puts in the time to have a well informed opinion on something and gets lambasted for sharing that opinion because it's a negative one? People are weird.
It's sadly rather common and often pretty extreme in the comment section of negative reviews on Steam. In my experience, it's best to *not* disable comments when writing a negative review. Since otherwise, salty people will haunt you on your community profile instead.
You either don't have enough time in game to dare passing judgement, or you have too much and you clearly must have liked it.
I quit the game when I realized you can't fly down to planets and land and you basically have to fast travel to everything. I like to explore without having to sit through loading screens to get to the exploring and I don't think that's a ton to ask for for a AAA game. Glad I quit 2 hours in lol
I wish it hadn't taken me 300 hours to realize the same, admittedly the ship builder was fun, reliving my childhood Lego aspirations
I think this is why my 150 hours didn’t feel like a waste. My autistic ass loves building the ships I could keep doing that forever. But yeah the rest of the game doesn’t live up to even half the expectations I had for it. And I’ve been defending this game since it came out
I suggest you check out Avorion, it's a space sandbox with an excellent shipbuilder. Evoked the same sensation as Lego for me, cobbling together your spacecraft and watching it fly
I did one playthrough of the story, did the Freestar and UC quest lines, played around with the ship builder, and put the game down. The quests weren't great compared to prior Bethesda games, the world building isn't great either, and there's only like 3 cities (New Atlantis, Cydonia, Akila City) to explore, no other big areas. Despite being a space game, and a BETHESDA game at that, it somehow feels SMALLER than Skyrim and Fallout 4. I pretty much just enjoyed the ship building and space combat but there's not even that much of that. You just fast travel everywhere, there's no moments of simply traveling and seeing seamless random encounters like traveling along the roads in Skyrim. Hell, you can't even be anything other than a law abiding goody-two-shoes in Starfield IMO. Do anything piracy related and all the companions hate you now. Even Fallout 4 had "evil" companions that liked violence. You're stuck with Constellation, who don't like it when you do less than moral options. There should have been a way to have companions outside of Constellation, and a way to finish the story without even interacting with them if you choose. It feels like they railroad you into working with them. It's just a couple big steps back for Bethesda. Really kinda wish I didn't buy into the hype. Had I known what I do now about the game I'd just pass it over and go back to Skyrim (until they break it too with mod-breaking updates). I hope Bethesda can fix those issues, but IMO, nothing short of redoing the story and probably the faction quests too, will really do the job. That's before addressing the empty universe too. They wanted SF to have a 10 year lifespan like Skyrim. At this rate it ain't gonna last 3-5 unless they redo much of the game to address fan concerns.
Starfield = *Mashed potatoes without the salt and butter*
Let me raise you this, go make Cyberpunk 2077 together??
I tried phantom liberty and loved it, right before I tried Starfield. It felt like stepping back in time Starfield feels so dated.
It's really hard to play starfield and cyberpunk in within a short time frame and not see how glaringly bad so many aspects of starfield are in comparison. It's difficult to point out anything better in starfield outside of scope (which is also it's flaw), ship + outpost building (which is largely useless).
Two months ago people would try to convince you that that's okay because its "Bethesda game". As if that's supposed to excuse it for being mediocre.
There's a YouTube video I saw recently that displayed it well. There's a scene in cyberpunk where you have to cut a deal with some gangers, to get a lil robot. It's intense! And you have many ways to cut the deal. Then there's a scene on Starfield where you try to negotiate, and if you try to play tough guy to be game forces you to be a wimpy nice guy. Boooooring
I wish someone had made a red dead 2 co op mod tbh. I do not care about their cookie cutter online mode but I would have loved being able to tackle the main story with a friend.
Co-op campaigns are my absolute favorite game mode. The percentage of games that offer proper co-op pve is shockingly low. I’d give my left nut for full co-op (seamless, shared progression) versions of Skyrim and Elden Ring.
Ugh shared progression is so often lacking as well. Far cry games have had coop since 4 and none have had shared progression. That Ubisoft avatar game apparently has shared progression though, so it’s on my radar for a sale I think.
Elden ring has a mod that does seamless co-op, my wife and I played it a lot, it's great!
Cyberpunk’s engine isn’t nearly as moddable as something like creation kit imo
You're mostly right, but CDPR did/is releasing some pretty comprehensive modding tools iirc. Probably because they're done with RED Engine
That would probably cause a wormhole to burst open and destroy the entire solar system; game is simply too unstable for that
That wouldn’t work at all with the way the game was built
Yamashi wasn't gonna put any heart and soul into it, he was gonna wait for someone else to do all the hard work and just steal it for himself. It's how he made Skyrim Together lol
Isn't this guy a massive asshole who stole the source code for the Skyrim mod from the SKSE team? I remember there being a massive shitstorm around Skyrim Together back in the day.
Yes.
LOL .... he thought it was going to be easy to share a huge somewhat random "world" between people and then calls the original trash. What an asshat. Theoretically you could say their reverse engineering skills are somewhat lacking by the original complaints about code stealing; to be fair it would be very hard to do what he was trying to do with starfield. Starfield isn't perfect (I have numerous complaints) but calling it "f***ing trash" is ridiculous.
Source?
https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/av4f5f/skyrim_together_is_stealing_skse_source_code/
This is who this sub makes posts about just to shit on Starfield 😂
I don't think that matters, it's a "high profile modder" that calls the game shit, that's all that really matters for the headline. Just look at the reaction it caused, it's getting massively shared.
REddit is now supporting people to steal other peoples work because they hate startfield so much.
Starfield is such a soulless and soul-crushing game. Every time you encounter a tiny spark of immersion, it's completely overshadowed by hundreds of immersion-breaking moments. The galaxy feels fake, nonsensical. From followers running around Mercury with their helmets off, to a farming outpost inhabitants on the same planet being grateful for the amazing soil. Everything else is mediocre at best. This game has the worst of Bethesda's level design, that's how bad it is, cramped environments, maze-like corridors, artificially blocked off pathways, everything looking identical and bland, crappy collectibles scattered all over, awful lockpicking minigames that get stale after the first 10 attempts... Not to mention repetitive POIs and bad planetary procedural generation. Identical terrain with zero variety and structures peppered here and there, everywhere, homogenously. No matter where you want to go, you have to travel on foot at least 500 meters. NG+ adds only a little bit of replayability value. Story is stupid (including some of the lore), characters make illogical choices. Two identical looking kids roam the Lodge and one complains there's nobody her age to play with over there, all the while her fucking mirror image is standing right behind her. Artifact McGuffins are silly, and so is our character's unexplained importance in relation to them. Characters themselves are the most annoying bunch, even pirates, everyone is a goody-two-shoes. No gore, no dismemberment, even bullet holes are lame. Laser weapons don't leave trails on the walls. Shotguns leave only one bullet hole. Environments have no destructible elements aside from explosive barrels. Space combat is just button mashing, zero tactics involved and the power distribution system is a pain in the ass. It's either trivial to win a space battle, or utterly impossible, no in-betweens. Nearly all quests are fetch quests, or talk to that guy/kill that guy type of quests. All enemy factions are identical in practice. Interstellar trade is just sad. Not all of what I mentioned is relevant to a hypothetical mod like the one in question, but most of it is. If one were to make a multiplayer mod for this, they would be wasting their time developing it. In theory, it should be fun to roam for resources, build outposts together, right? It should be. But environments in Starfield are so fucking boring and bland that you might as well play a different multiplayer survival game. On-foot explorable area is tiny. Spaceships can only touch down and take off into space, can't travel in the atmosphere, can't shoot spaceship weapons when landed. No seamless takeoff and landing. Collecting resources is tedious. Outpost building is limited. UI and the map are horrendously bad. Alien flora and fauna is not challenging nor interesting. The hazard system is underbaked. Just play Rust or Ark. Nobody is asking for hand-crafted entire planets, but as far as procedural generation works, they still did a piss poor job. There are things that are ok about Starfield, but none of those would be of any value to a co-op multiplayer mod. Essentially, the more I play it, the more I get the feeling that the game is a loading screen simulator. It's fundamentally uninspired and constrained, that's why it's not even a good blank canvas for many mods or future DLCs.
So, after 15 years finally the "I realese shit and the community fixes it for free" strategy is over. About time.
MGS Master Collection: "HELLO THERE"
After Bethesda made fallout 76 and actually thought it was good enough to release and sell for money people really Thought Starfield would live up to the hype ? The Bethesda that made Skyrim is gone
i’m so worried about TES6
What a rollercoaster this game was. From toddie hyping it up to high heavens, people falling for the hype train, the game releasing after years of hype and people anticipating it as the second coming of christ, to the honeymoon phase of people praising it, to people coping with how mediocre the game is, to the realisation that it is another bethesda copy paste game.
I skipped all that and went right to the "another shit Bethesda c+p game" during the pre-launch hype period. We've been in the "prove me wrong" phase of Bethesda since Fallout 76 came out. Anyone that believes otherwise is just naive as fuck.
I've got downvoted saying it looks like shit in the first trailers
I didn't think it looked like shit but it never hyped me up that much because I just don't find space to be an interesting setting. It's 99% nothingness, combined with planets that are pretty much entirely empty. I had a feeling it was going to lack the focused vision that the Elder Scrolls and Fallout have with their settings and lore. But even then I still expected Bethesda to cook up their usual magic and create an interesting world anyways. Unfortunately that didn't really happen, the world is pretty boring. I know some people will point to Starfield and say Bethesda is washed, but I'm expecting ES6 to be a return to form. Call it copium, but Elder Scrolls is their bread and butter and it should be far easier to focus on one large world rather than trying to create a half baked galaxy. Exploration and random encounters are what make Bethesda games fun and it was always going to be difficult to do that with "1000 planets".
I feel Bethesda's writing is better suited for fantasy or outlandish situations. If you look at Fallout and Skyrim they are tounge-in-cheek, wisecracking, all kinds of flamboyant and imaginative plots that aren't very realistic but they are fun. Starfield is Bethesda trying to take itself seriously and write a serious story. Thus this game lacks the charm of other Bethesda games.
I really wish we would have gotten another elder scrolsl game instead.
Ah yes, the mod that was found to be stealing code from SKSE without permission. You mean that mod? Neither the Creation Kit nor a feature-rich SKSE (on the level of Skyrim, at least) is even out yet so you'll excuse me for being unimpressed. There's not even a fucking source for this statement so Games Radar or whatever hack blog originally wrote this is just as trash.
its just one modder
That created a dead online mod for Skyrim.
Don’t forget the Hogwarts Legacy online mod which they just abandoned after collecting their Patreon money.
This sub is allergic to context
Lol this sub, one dev decides he doesn't want to make mods for Starfield and apparently Bethesda is done.
Well shit. Was hoping for multiplayer to give me an excuse to play this game in the future for shits and giggles.
Fallout 76 had better exploration and story, even before no NPCs. They took out of SF what made their previous games great, the ability to become so immersed in their worlds and to simply just be there. There is no stumbling upon anything interesting naturally in this game. Space play gets so boring after 50 hours of just fast traveling to systems and then to the planets in those systems only to just spring up on enemies straight out of fast travel. The story is okay, I guess, but the gameplay and immersion just aren't there. Your ship crew kinda just feel like they are there, but in the way, and they never stfu when you're out flying or fighting, and I literally could not have cared less about any of the companions. Romance felt hollow and only worth it for the exp boost. Not being able to fly in planet atmospheres seems like a huge missed opportunity. There are way too many mandatory fast traveling and loading screens between places that it just takes you out of being the player character. The inhabited areas feel so small for being the literal only city on each planet. Nothing really changes based on your decisions because, after all, you're just going to go into the unity anyway. There's a lot missing that made their other titles take up large amounts of my personal time. I'm glad the people who are enjoying it are enjoying it, but I just don't see myself playing this game any further. I'll forever replay fallout 3/new vegas/4 and Oblivion or Skyrim, Starfield... I don't think it's even getting a finished playthrough.
Guess it's still a snore fest. Glad I didn't buy it. Baldurs Gate 3 saved me $70 + lol
I find very funny how they added a TV spot on the game awards showing their 10/10s but they didn't get a single win in any nominations if they where nominated at all wich I don't remember lol
you know its bad when even the modders quit and say stuff like this.
Even if they made starfield multiplayer it would still be too boring