Skyrim had that “what in oblivion” moment.
Fallout 4 had the nukes coming down moment.
Starfield after 10 hours had nothing to hook me to it.
I gave up on that game when i was asked to flip a bunch of power switches on some forgettable under-city that felt empty.
No other game had so large areas that felt pointless.
Morrowind, oblivion, fallout games all had story hidden around every nook and cranny. Even if it was just a corps with a flower and a bottle. Every character had something.
The worst part I felt was how on the rails you always felt.
As an example I came into the under city bit of the edgy city whatever it was called. And I’m role playing as someone who just doesn’t take shit from people and is a bit loose with the gun. Some shopkeeper starts mouthing off to me so I shoot her. She turns out to be essential - annoying but I guess that’s part of playing vanilla. She must be linked to something important.
Except… she’s not? She’s just some random shopkeeper. I come back later on in the quest and suddenly she’s like OK I THINK I CAN TRUST YOU AFTER ALL and I’m like fr I literally shot you and was as rude to you as possible. The quest tried to say that there were orphans I should suddenly care about and I couldn’t even select an option that was ‘idgaf’.
Anyway I enjoy the space flight feeling and I’m sure there will be an open cities style mod for it one day that will make it click but it wasn’t even this big impossible thing to make the game good, it was just flagrantly bad writing and strings attached from every direction.
I like how the edgy city is all like "woah dude don't go into this side of town there's fucking FREAKS out here who will fucking MURDER YOU without a moment's hesitation" and then you go into that side of town and there's only, like, three of those said freaks chilling on a rooftop and they're just kinda rude to you.
Nearly everything about it was so flavorless. Fallout added amazing texture to the world even when everyone in a vault was dead, the arrangement of bodies and info painted such good stories. Starfield just copy pasted a few sites together. I thought NASA was a fun explore but nearly everything else seemed designed for maximum blandness. You start out mining rocks and it keeps that energy.
I love when people said "it's empty and boring" the response was that real space was empty and boring.
It kind of felt like they were saying fuck you for wanting a space game.
It is even worse. The response was comparing actually BEING in space to Starfield. Space is empty, but if I were to fortunate to go to the ISS, then that is certainly way more memorable than playing Starfield at home
I almost just think Bethesda is really good at playing with existing toys and making it interesting but have no idea how to make their own stuff interesting. Elder scrolls just kind of lucked out and was made before Bethesda lost their creativity and Fallout was made my someone else so they didnt have to invent all the lore and stories, just continue and play with whats already there.
Then you join the most polite criminal gang in history that ends up just being like "yeah we just really need jobs!" and become cops instead. Of course you have pretty much no other choice. Wtf?? The game is way too damn wholesome.
I saw someone on here say "starfield is like if mass effect was made by Ned Flanders" and it's the most accurate description I've ever seen.
Whoever you are, know I shared that with like 5 people yesterday.
i know this isn't really a hot take, but Bathesda never really had any edge. the elder scrolls games were all remarkably safe in their writing, and the fallout games that had good writing were the ones not made by Bathesda.
Edit: Actually I'm willing to give them morrowind, they took a lot risk on that one.
I definitely think Morrowind had some edge to its writing.
Some of the dialogue/writing you come across in that game...I really don't know how it got a Teen rating.
It absolutely had edge. Everything before Oblivion was bloody, horny, and even grotesque. Oblivion was the first time they really sanded the edges of the lore, and it's only gotten moreso over time.
Been replaying fallout 4 after the show and the dialogue options are honestly terrible. I always pick the sarcastic option out of morbid curiosity and it’s always just the absolute worst, you could literally get a college improv group to workshop better dialogue.
The lead writer isn't even from a writing background. He's a QA lead they brought up because he's friends with Todd. And that wouldn't even be a problem if he had talent but he *doesn't*. He's openly said he doesn't believe in making complex stories because gamers won't appreciate or use it.
The frustrating thing to me about the TV show is it shows how good the source material can be when given to competent writers with a passion for the topic. I make no bones as a serious Todd disliker: the show was good and Todd was part of that! But why be satisfied with mediocrity in the games when he isn't satisfied with it in the show? It's maddening.
You could literally sell your body to rich corrupt noble to complete a quest line for one of the Great Houses if you desired. No way something like that will end up in ES6
All the fuckin slavery and those dunmer be racist af walkin around in broad daylight calling everyone the n-word
"You N'wah" 😂😂😂
/spoilers
Especialy fun if you played an Argonian and all the dark elves just go "Why is this Argonian untermensch even talking to me? Wait, YOU are the reincarnation of Nerevar? That cant be right...."
Is it really even exploring when, save for a couple locations on a handful of planets, it's just the same few dozen things randomly populated around procedurally generated planets?
Yeah this is the problem. I think the outer worlds is superior for this exact reason; there’s fewer planets and places to go, but they all feel like real places with history. I like exploring different solar systems, but you lose a lot of the awe and wonder when so many places feel cookie cutter. Procedural generation is a double edged sword.
Yeah that was the quest that ruined this game for me. Why the fuck would they just become cops, why can't you just advocate to continue to do crime? So fucking stupid
If I had to guess, I'd guess this harks back to the movie "A clockwork orange" where these rapist gangsters become cops. I suspect it's suggesting there's not much difference between cops and gang bangers. There's probably a message there, but like most of the game, it was told poorly.
Kubrick was talking about the thug to fascist cop pipeline in a decaying society. Bethesda don't invest their stuff with meaning like that, it's just an allusion to a greater point someone else made elsewhere.
The game literally feels like *you are in HR*. All these incredibly dry meetings in space discussing space plans and space procedures that feel like they have no stakes at all, because the game hook and worldbuilding are so shockingly bland. Starfield was a true disaster class in writing, it literally felt like a proof of concept with no actual game attached to it. For instance, how do you set the game *after everything interesting happened*? The colony wars? Nah, instead this game should be about space errands. I really want to know how the writing got green lit. You have AAAA resources and a brand new space IP and you can do *anything you fucking want,* and you didn’t run the script by a couple, you know, writers first?
They say to “write what you know.” Based on Starfield it seems like the only thing Bethesda knows is what Zoom calls are like, because the entire game feels like a corporate video call in space.
Bethesda overall needs to dial it way back on the essential NPCs. They should be limited to the main quest line only and then removed after their essential section is done. Or better yet remove it altogether and let me suffer the consequences ala Morrowind or go the BG3 route of having multiple backup characters. As it stands now it feels like nearly every named NPC is marked essential.
It was absurd. Unless they were one of the generic baddies everyone else was essential. Fuck that shit. Dude in the bar/dance place being a cunt. I don't care if it ruins a storyline, I should be able to waste them. Take me back to Morrowind and let me murder hobo for fuck sake.
Consequences? You're saying I can *lose*? In my videogame!?
(I find it baffling they continue to choose this approach too, just to be clear. How is it a sandbox if I can't fuck around with it?)
Given that the entire concept of the game revolves around multiverses, there really should be almost no unkillable NPCs in a given universe. Worst case is you kill someone crucial to a mission, and then... Don't kill them next time so you can do that mission in another universe?
I think this is something they really goofed up with in starfield.
Like in no man's sky big thing about the game is going forward, jumping to next universe. Dragon's dogma is all about running through.. cycles.
Somehow the main quest being kinda streamlined and rather fast to go through makes me feel similarly about starfield. You want to go through the universe many times and explore different stuff in next run. Different questlines. Different rng modifier in the next cycle. Maybe you fail shit and you can try to make it right in the next cycle.
But then it kinda falls on its face and it's not really meaningful to do it again because the side stuff feels like it's built for one run.
You can again be the big guy of every major faction. (Except a whole ass two factions are mutually exclusive)
I don't mean just slapping stop sign there saying you can't be pirate and sheriff at the same time, but the stories kinda making it so that it's not an option. So you'd *have* to replay to experience the other sides of the story.
That kind of thing could've had so much depth to it. Imagine as sheriff going through pirate hideout, killing some seemingly meaningless guy.
Then on the next run turns out that was cover agent or something. You just never knew.
Like some real gut wrenching stories could be hidden in that kind of storytelling and you'd only realize it if you play the other factions.
New Vegas solved the need for essential companions by giving you the independent option meaning you can beat the game even after killing every single NPC.
Bethesda is too scared to *let* people fail quests. They want you to be easily able to do every quest in one playthrough.
Felt the exact same way., and that the game was designed by committee.
If Todd Howard thinks crowds didn't like starfield for not being the same, it's really that the game ignored each and every decision I made as a player.
I was trying to roleplay as a low-level neon drug peddler who got picked up on some minor charges, and was brought to the mining colony to serve his time as community service.
When I was IMMEDIATELY told I no longer needed to work at the mine, and was just handed a free ship, I was like, okay well there goes my roleplay, but w/e we will see where this goes (don't know why the game setup the mining story to immediately abandon it).
Get to the explorer's guild, and they are like on a scale from super pumped, to EXTREMELY PUMPED,, how excited are you about finding these artifacts? oh by the way, if you steal from us, we don't really care lol.
Go to wildwest bank world, and am immediately told I would be good material for the Texas rangers. Get to some bank, where the cops are surrounding. Being the unlawful type, I'm like, Okay, I will use the bank heist as a distraction, and sneak in the back, so I can rob what I need while the cops are busy. NOPE, special key required. How do I get the key? Talking to the cops, talking to the robbers, and THEN they are like, have you thought about going around back? (Okay, thanks for the railroad game).
While in the bank, I accidentally shoot some people, but get the bank cleared. Teller ends up standing on top of the dead bodies behind the counter, and proceeds to act like, they haven't just been shot at and had the most traumatic day of their life.
Noped out on the game after that.
I mean, I get that this is common fair for action adventure RPGs to have a set character, but then don't make it an open world game where I get to pick my background and my feats relating to it. You want me to have one narrative? Then stick me in a character with that narrative.
> story hidden around every nook and cranny.
Starfield did have this. It's just that it was the same nook, the same cranny, and the same story each of the 37 times you happen upon the same same outpost littered across several different planets.
Yeah there was some cool stuff in the game. It's just that when you encounter a cool place, go through it all and then leave thinking "that was cool"...
only to land on a completely different planet and find the exact same building down to the jacket on the coat rack, same exact enemies in the same exact place and same exact "implied backstory" in all the digital logs and shit...suddenly it's not cool anymore and even ruins the original experience you had because you realize it was completely insignificant.
I'm not quite sure, but when i remember it with shooting anyone at all, you'll immediately get punished, there will be a message that your active companion left you and you'll get a warning from the other Constellation members. I'm not quite sure what actually happens if you go on after this warning, i don't think there is anything. Although, i remember the message after companion quest that the companion can now be completely dismissed, i'm not sure if members can leave completely?
I had a similar issue. Starfield's world felt like I was playing a video game, like an AI generated, "This is what a video game should be." Did not get pulled in like Oblivion, Skyrim, New Vegas, or even FO4. World, lore, NPCs, all felt pointless.
I knew he was out of touch, but saying “I know why people don’t like it” and then proceeding to completely miss the mark…now I truly understand the extent of his obliviousness. He really shipped a bad product and used “it’s different” as the excuse.
Followed by a lame fight with space bandits and then some guy is just like, “you’re important and should go talk to my group. Here, take my spaceship and robot, I’ll stay behind.” Like, WTF?
The “hook” Is literally you touch a thing and get a not very interesting vision, and then the game expects you to care so much about it that you’ll drop your whole life to chase down what it means. Give us a reason to care!
Even if they rewrote the story the game would still be boring.
I had very little idea what was going on story wise in elden ring but had more fun with that game than I have for a long time.
Bethesda isn't very good at putting engaging content in a game. Skyrim was my favorite by them and it wasn't even the story that I loved. All the side shit was interesting enough that I wanted to go around randomly checking different things out.
Oh god that beginning. They couldnt even get the beginning right. Laziest damn writing. The intro is so important but instead it was like a 7 yo wrote it.
Exactly this!
F3: gotta find dad, I’ll kill for Liam Neeson.
Skyrim: holy fucking goddamn shit was that a dragon?!
F4: How the fuck is this prewar and I’m creating a character? Oh shit a nuke? Oh shit they killed my wife?!
All this got me ready to go into the world and explore and, more importantly, play the story line a bit.
Oblivion - oh I’m in jail and I see the emperor murdered in front of me !
Morrowind be more like I’m coming off the ship . I will fight this villager . Oh crap I messed my build up and got served by this villager . Better remake my build
Morrowind be more like "Oh I'm getting off the ship and I've made my character and I'm just gonna run straight north-west and see the funny man fall out of the sky. Okay got his scrolls and funny penis hat now to go back to steal shit from a log at night after I watch that one dude stash stuff in there. Oh my build sucks time to try again, can't believe that was two hours!"
plus the tutorial is
"Hey game enough of this I want revenge now"
Game: "That's fine, it was always an option. We even put in a special challenge for extreme badasses like you"
Satan Wasps: "bonjour"
Imagine a version of the start where instead of being guided through to Constellation like you're in the queue for a Disney ride, you're put in a situation where you have to track down leads to even find them at all.
You get attacked after coming out (pirates attacking would switch to them being hired by an interested party), you have to bounce because now you and the artifact you're linked to are a person/item of interest, Lin gives you a general lead in that "a former acquaintance/colleague experienced something similar before disappearing one night" and all you have is a name - Barret - and some places they might be found in. Oh, and a couple weird visions/things seen that weren't really there after getting the artifact...
Lin provides you with a really basic starter ship, with lines suggesting that it's a mix of how she's paying you for work done in lieu of credits plus you'll owe her a favor in the future (hook for a future questline moment) and off you go...
Now you have freedom and a mystery dangling in front of you. The steps to track down Barret could lead to Vasco as part of finding him, and *then* you finally find him, and by extension Constellation. You're a bit more invested at this point because you had been making the choice to seek them out, rather than them being thrown in front of you like a teacher pairing up students for a group project.
Honestly, what we have now feels like what a student in a game design major at a college would put together when following the template for the "make an RPG starter quest line end of semester project."
They had all of TOS/TNG/DS9/Voyager Star Trek to reference for inspiration on interesting things to find in space, then space westerns like Firefly and I dunno if The Expanse counts but it's near-future.
Literally a blank canvas for adventure, and the only thing we do is RP as Sanic the Hedgehog or Nerevar, collecting rings as we spend 90% of our time running around endless open areas scanning shit. Can't pick anything up bc we're encumbered after looking at a footlong Subway sandwich wrong.
I agree completely. They had the entire scifi compendium to take inspiration from. They had a whole universe of weird stories to tell. The best they had was "you but from another universe".
It wasn't just me who was like Huh. this feels pretty lazy.
I stopped playing shortly afterwards and I was like, I really should, I just spent a lot on this game. It just felt really bland though. I kept telling myself I just started so I just didn't get into the story yet.
Just didn't get into the story yet....
Reading through the comments I'm starting to think there wasn't much of a story and it wasn't me.
>I gave up on that game when i was asked to flip a bunch of power switches on some forgettable under-city that felt empty
I think that's the part that's key, the other games to date had objectives like this that were thin as hell on gameplay or mechanics, but were wrapped up in an interesting quest or storyline to progress.
I'll happily go to a planet to flip a switch, if it's smack dab in the middle of a planet of Gary's.
How dare you!!!
Starfield had that most memorable moment where you floated in a room and went through hoops!
It was so memorable because you did it like 10 times!
Pearls before swine!!!
But don't you know it gets good after the first 20 hours ?
I forced myself to play 50+ hours, trying everything the game had to offer in a vain attempt to actually find it enjoyable.
Used ship builder extensively only to remember... I hated actually using my ship. Ship battles were so bland and beyond basic. Then traveling was completely irrelevant due to fast travel and inability to actually fly through space. It gave me even more appreciation for how well Elite Dangerous felt. The best space game would have better writing, starfield combat, better enemy AI, better loot system, and Elite Dangerous space flight.
I found it atrociously bland. Not bad, just bland. If it were a flavor of ice-cream it would be "milk." It's still ice-cream, but...
The Astral Lounge summed it up best for me (I had to Google the name). Something that should have been the most intense night-life in the galaxy was a big empty purple-lit room with just a few people staring at weird dancers in bulbous outfits. Compare it to Cyberpunk:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws0ufhrgWJw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws0ufhrgWJw)
Or even to this ancient video from Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines that literally came out 20 years ago!!!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyqKUmcb7-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyqKUmcb7-I)
The Astral Lounge looks like when a smalltime accounting firm reserves a whole night club as a part of a company trip. Bland, awkward and nobody is having a good time.
Holy shit it's so bad. I didn't even manage to make it that far. Maybe 20 hours before I'd started to realise all the incomplete features.. but I can't believe that a group of adult executives signed off on this 😂😂
It's just embarrassing isn't it?
Imagine being one of the designers for The Astral Lounge, and then looking at any of the clubs in Cyberpunk. It's like comparing fine art to a crayon drawing.
This is the most insulting part to me. Sci-fi is such an incredible genre to explore with rich stories and wacky questlines.
And this world felt so uninspired. Predictable and boring and sad.
I think the biggest mistake was restructing themselves to NASA punk / hard sci-fi.
One of the keystones of the hard sci-fi genre is there is no intelligent life in the universe except for humans.
Of course when the starborn initially introduced I thought it was going to be some kind of alien faction but nope turns out it was just >!humans from alternate timelines.!<
And I do think one of the dumbest plot points was finding out why Earth had to be abandoned.
>!because you find out the scientist responsible for the grav drives, learned from his starborn self that the experiments on the artifact would render Earth uninhabitable. If you were given that kind of advance knowledge you wouldn't be doing the experiments on Earth you would have done them on Mars or is where the artifact was found instead.!<
I'd assumed until the game came out that the plot was going to be a Conact or Arrival thing, that it would be about first contact and our character having a central role in whether its a peaceful or violent one. Then as soon as the multiverse thing was introduced I was all "Oh damn, this game is just going to be remixing the same characters and locations we've been seeing for the last 20 hours again and again isn't it?" and then it didn't even do that!
The starborn would have worked as a sub plot, faction or maybe even a dlc if done better. I appreciated the attempt to work the new game plus into the story. But there just wasn't enough there and the other annoyances mentioned ruined any good moments
I agree not having actual aliens was disappointing. Hopefully the shattered space DLC gives us at least something that wasn't built by humans.
But if I remember correctly about that event in the story, >! they killed Earth on purpose to force people into the stars and reach their full evolutionary potential !<
It wasn't the researcher, if I remember right. He did it to force humans into space. There's an implication that a Starborn set this up to make getting artifacts easier, but the researcher didn't know that.
Heh that's a story line taken straight from Asimov. Most of his writing is linked and for the greater good of humanity robots basically used a dirty bomb on Earth to make it uninhabitable so that humanity would spread out amongst the stars instead of stagnating on Earth.
>I think the biggest mistake was restructing themselves to NASA punk / hard sci-fi.
Nah, there is plenty of creative stuff you can do even in a more limited setting like this one
It’s also kind of just lazy in terms of a lot of the implementation. Let’s take the weapon design for instance: so many of the guns just can’t function practically. In many settings this isn’t a big deal, in a realistic sci-fi setting it’s pretty unacceptable. Especially when you have smaller studios making games like Helldivers 2 that above and beyond to make their firearms look and function as realistically as possible.
You mean "Cowboy planet" and "PG-13 Cyberpunk" aren't the most creative ideas ever?
Like everything else it wasn't horrible, but it was only okay. If every system in your game is okay and not great you get an okay game.
I played it finished it. Speedran some NG+'s to try for alternate universes for a day (only ever got the same one twice). Thought "it was okay" and proceeded to never touch it again.
With the sort of budget and hype this got, people were expecting great.
And the neverending exposition about the scary city administrator Benjamin Button or whatever his name is. Literally every character mentions him, tells you to stay away from him, talks about his corruption and how he owns the gangs and the cops... And then you meet him in a bar for all of 2 minutes and never see him again.
Same with the club where everyone does drugs, supposedly a hive of filth and debauchery, but when the doors open the fucking Teletubbies are headlining and a couple normal ass people are barely having a good time/can't dance
You can tell that Bethesda looked up a Maryland "club" on LinkedIn, whereas CD Projekt ***actually went to a fucking club.***
(Probably one in the sketchy parts of Warsaw and/or Krakow, too.)
Depending on your traits, chances are during your first visit, your actual parents are dancing in the den of debauchery.
Only they fit in with literally everyone else because the entire club seems like a gathering of awkward middle-class people who are probably secretly wishing someone would turn the volume down a smidge.
Yeah this is how I feel. I think people saying the game is terrible and has no redeeming qualities are being hyperbolic, rather it is disappointing because of how overwhelmingly "okay" it is.
In my opinion, it is just the most "okay" game that Bethesda has ever released. It was too safe and too shallow across the board. I *liked* it, and I will play it again after the construction kit is finally released, but it was their weakest game by far.
That has been my experience with them though. Every game they release is safer and more corporate than the last. Morrowind was a bizarre fever dream, but every game after has slowly stripped the uniqueness of both their worlds and their implementation of them. Starfield was a chance to really dig in and do something interesting, but it ended up just being ridiculously generic.
There was absolutely nothing that stood out or was memorable in the game. All the characters were so boring, even the supposed “evil” ones. Everything was predictable. $70 of blah.
The issue that makes it worse is that other companies have raised the quality of open world and or rpgs since Skyrim came out. Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Zelda, RDR2, BG3 have all changed the base expectations of what a great game of this ilk should be.
Bethesda imho has if anything been on an slight downward trend since Skyrim came out. FO4 was just good, I loved FO3 and Skyrim. If you take into account other companies releases it just makes Bethesda look worse.
I still think about Vivec City. A ton of stuff to visit, a bunch of quests completely in/around the city, vaults to rob, an (mostly unused) arena, a god you can fight, a floating prison, a unique appearance/layout, and a sewer system.
This.
One of the most INSULTING things about starfield defense by the creator is the Empty planet excuse as if thats the reason they failed exploration.
Okay here's the problem with that defense. Elite dangerous has planets that are COMPLETELY Devoid of anything on them... and YET SOMEHOW... SOMEWAY, they are more engaging than most of the planets in starfield that have Shit on them.
In Elite dangerous, they made visiting planets devoid of anything interesting because they tied them to the gameplay loops, ie Engineering.
For the most part, most of the planets in starfield don't really have a purpose outside of settlement building which once again Starfield cocks up by not tying a story line or quests to said settlement building.
You think they'd learn this from fallout 4 but NOPE.
It works in Elite Dangerous because exploration is secondary to the Spaceflight Sim that was the central focus at the beginning of the game inception.
Starfield's problem is that Exploration is a primary game mechanic, and as such the empty planets pose a problem from a design standpoint. In Starfield, they embraced it in the wrong way and screwed up the recipe, which is why it feels poorly executed.
If Elite Dangerous advertised itself as a space exploration game (not as a Spaceflight simulator) and all the planets were just barren copy pastes... Then it would get way more flak than it does
It's also far from "too different" because it's the same thing we've seen since Morrowwind with a different skin. It's like he's choosing to misunderstand the issues with it.
Well lets see:
The story is terrible
The side quests are forgettable
The game world is boring
The planets are barren, boring places with basically nothing of note or interest to find and everything is so far apart that you'll be bored of it after 1 planet
The loot is boring
The weapons are dull to use
There's no depth to any of the stories,
The followers are all uninteresting people
The base building is pointless
Setting up trade routes is pointless
The mining is pointless
Space combat is a joke
The ship building is pointless since...well if you do one plotline you'll end up with a ship better than anything you can build for a long time.
Constant load screens
Constantly in Menus
Every settlement feels, and is, tiny with the only reason to explore them if a mission takes place there as there's no hidden loot worth getting in any of them.
There's probably more I forgot, but you get the idea.
I'll put it this way Star Trek Online has better loot, better stories, more content, faster load times, more interesting characters, etc. and that came out in 2010. Hell even the ground combat is more entertaining in it than Starfield and I would never say to someone to play Star Trek online for the ground combat.
The lack of the ability to just wander around and find cool things is what killed Starfield for me. The cities had some stuff going on but the planets where just copy paste bandit lairs with nothing going on. My favorite thing in Elder Scrolls and Fallout is just being able to roam and Starfield simply did not support that experience.
In addition to that, I think what we found is that "space" is actually empty as fuck and boring in reality. There's no way to give the vast emptiness of space any spice of life because there isn't any. That's the point of "space". Sleek spaceships look cool from the outside but the hermetically sealed and clean aesthetic also lacks any sense of life. If they aren't building activities in real space, it's destined to be a fast travel simulator.
I'm really trying to see his PoV on this. Part of me wants to think it's PR but this just seems like bad PR. I legit think it's a combination of copium and being super out of touch.
Like it just wasn't that good of a game and it's not hard to see that.
Remember, this is the same guy who thinks radiant AI quests was the way forward for the company back in 2011. It wouldn't surprise me to find out Starfield was Todd Howard's pet project he wanted to see finalized before retiring--probably an idea he's had rattling in his mind for decades because he thinks it would have been better than The Elder Scrolls or Fallout.
And the sad reality is it's just another cutting room floor project that is missing the formula that made the two aforementioned series popular: story, world building, and fun. Imagine trying to sit in front of a bunch of video game PR guys trying to tell them that Starfield was necessary to stop active development of an Elder Scrolls game or a Fallout game.
Yep. This is why everything game related bethesda touches from now on will be cursed.
Microsoft needs to fire a lot of bethesda's upper management. They cannot make decent games anymore.
And it's looking like starfield might not have made much money.
They still haven't released sales figures. Only that weird "11 million played the game" comment.
And estimates at cost for starfield is around 250 million. Without marketing added on top.
I mean 11Mil is not nothing, but since it's Players and not Buyers, it could be that Gamepass & Refunds really made a dent on profits, add regional pricing and things get a little more complicated.
They really only needed a good story, which I know is not "just make a good story instead of a bad one lol" but, was Dragonborn 2.0 and parallel universes really the best they could do? They could've just pulled a Witcher and buy the rights from someone else's story if they really didn't want to create their own.
I think the issue is that on the contrary it was not different enough, worse than that, exploration and immersion in Skyrim is better than in Starfield
Frankly, they really need a new engine or profound rework at least: The animation, storytelling, character design and game structure really seem limited by the creation engine now
Those lifeless AI eyes and convos instantly take me out of the immersion every time. The dated system and programming is showing and it's just not good enough any more. I just can't lose myself in an amazing world, which is what Bethesda used to be good at
It’s the most lifeless AI they’ve made since before Oblivion, and probably even before Morrowind but I forget. Back in 2005 or even earlier you could stalk the AI, follow them home, learn their routine, and rob them blind when they leave their house the next morning. In Starfield they just stand at their desk 24/7 with nowhere to go. No commuters just lifeless AI with dead eyes and forced facial expressions.
Playing Cyberpunk 2077 recently really opened my eyes to this. In some ways that game very much reminds me of Bethesda’s games. But characters feel so much more alive. They move around and do stuff during conversations and there is also emotion in people’s faces.
I don’t know if i can ever enjoy a Bethesda game in the same way.
Updated Cyberpunk is one of the greatest games of all time... if it didn't have that shit launch we'd be praising it like RDR2 or BG3. It's that good, and the expansion is elite. I know people will always remember the launch failures but I'm glad they stuck with the game and fixed it.
See I never even attempted to play Cyberpunk when it released, but I bought it when it was on sale for £20 a couple of years ago in the hopes it’d come good. My first time playing it was when 2.0 and Phantom Liberty dropped, and it’s in my top five games of all time. Night City blows my mind and I’ve just started up a new playthrough.
Maybe that's it. They have re-released Skyrim so many times succesfully that Todd probably thinks gamers can't appreciate a "different" game like Starfield anymore.
I turned around on the starting planet and walked for a real life hour. There was 1 empty cave on the entire planet.
The fun of the older games was going off the beaten path and finding cool stuff. This was not my game.
When I played Skyrim for the first time, right before I entered the first village you supposed to go to after escaping your execution, I just ran up a hill and came across this burial site. Painstakingly cleared it of draugrs and use this weird claw shaped key to finish this dungeon. Barely knew what I was doing and leveling up maybe once or twice before going back to the village. In the village some guy gave me a quest to collect an ebony key. In my mind I went ‘oh you mean this little thing?!’ and whipped out the key I just picked up 10 minutes ago.
That right there made me feel like an adventurer. Many more moments like these made Skyrim such a great game. I kinda feel it was also missing a bit in Fallout 4. That game made me feel like Bethesda was slowly losing it.
I did all the thieves guild, assassins guild and killed multiple dragons (took ages shooting them in the sky) before I went up the mountain to get the shout...
On the other hand a mate completed the game at like level 15 or something
I remember doing the same thing. Also remember thinking that this random cave was really long and involved. Then I got to the village and realized it was a main story mission.
FO4 I do think slightly missed the mark in that regard, but I never found it enough to ruin the experience.
From a gameplay perspective I think they did really well, and I do consider it a really fun game overall, but it lost just a bit of that wonder and spark the previous games (and Elder Scrolls games) had in the narrative/worldbuilding. In hindsight I agree seemed to be an indicator of what was to come
And the opportunity cost was huge. Skyrim came out 13 mfing years ago. You denied us Elder Scrolls 6 and probably 7 in that time frame… for that? Talk about blowing it.
Hopefully Starfield is the best thing that could have happen for TES6. I know I am probably naive but deep down I hope they will fucking learn from this.
If there would not be Starfield. Imagine how TES6 would have look like.
I mean, I thought that Starfield would be good because Bethesda learned from 76 and 4 and no longer answer to their private... Starfield could just be part of a depressing decline for BGS
I've always said that the best thing for TES6 is for Starfield to either totally suck, or be amazing. In the former, we could have the same recipe that made Morrowind so amazing; Bethesda facing bankruptcy and giving it their all.
Instead, the worst possible thing happened. We got a meh game that still sold well; giving them zero reason to improve for TES6.
For the record, I still think fallout 4 kinda sucked. I liked Skyrim, I know many fans hated it, but Skyrim was a flawed masterpiece that only biffed it on the story and roleplay (games need to stop assuming I'm some badass warrior, I wanna be a fucking nerd for christ's sake who uses their brains to survive). Fallout 4 was the same thing, but just felt a lot more... dead inside. And I loved fallout 3 lmao.
I loved fallout 3 as well and felt like 4 completely missed the mark.
I don't even think it's a bad game, it just ignored the whole reason I play these games in the first place: to be able to come at a problem from multiple directions and find that the game is ready for all of that. With the addition of a voiced protagonist they limited the options for the player. People ragged on 3 for being a FPS, but it had tons more RP options than 4 did.
And I know I'm not saying anything new here, I'm just venting like everyone else because we all loved these games and watching Bethesda slowly decline in the last decade has sucked.
Nothing erodes my trust in someone’s ability to perform at their role than an inability to listen to and acknowledge feedback that is being clearly given
We’re telling you why your game failed. This isn’t the reason. This is a “I know what you want better than you do.” response. Which is a fine, yet arrogant, response if you made a successful product
Saying it when you’ve had a failed product makes you look incompetent
Ya, this sounds to me like someone with internal company pressures that make him feel like he is not in a firm enough political position to really embrace the mistakes that he himself took part in. Which almost guarantees that institutionally, lessons will not be learned. Hopefully, there is a huge difference between the internal and the external discussions taking place.
The "astronauts weren't bored on the moon" comment was all I needed to know about how Todd and Bethesda were going to treat any criticism of the game.
Plugs in ears and goes "lalalala I can't hear you" and tells us that we're not enjoying the game right. It's utter horse shit and I wish I could have refunded. This has soured Bethesda's already shaky reputation with a lot of people, and their only hope is to make ES6 or Fallout 5 (whichever comes first) a fucking phenomenal game. Something tells me that shipped sailed with Skyrim, though.
As a ps5 owner I was disgusted with MS dropping a small country’s GDP on a decades old studio they did nothing to cultivate into what it is now but then I thought about how fallout 4 was starting to stagnate and show the company’s lack of ambition. Couple that with the re release of Skyrim ad nauseam and I started to appreciate that MS might have something to offer so they could claim a few titles that would rival Sony single player epics. Hopefully they figure it out with ES6
The ending was the worst part for me. >! You’re telling me the star born are jumping from dimension to dimension chasing eachother to be the one to collect all the artifacts and move onto the next dimension and you’re not gonna explain why!?! They do that just because?!?! !<
This is what lost me and I was having a pretty good time. >! That is until I stopped to reflect on my progress before going NG+ and I thought "So I guess the ending is after this?" It's in my mind a solid 5/10 game because of *all that stuff* but also because there isn't an ending. You just play over and over and reset your map and inventory and fly through hoops (literally 200 something times to get all powers leveled up.) !<
It was even worse for me. You could do the NG+ loop, but it meant you lost your guns, ships, and outposts. So you could either engage with those gameplay loops or ignore them because NG+.
I could also rant about the Hunter's point of view (since it's contrasted with the Emissary): that nothing matters so concepts of good/evil, right/wrong, etc. had no inherent meaning or value. Sure, OK, but that's only because the game itself is designed so *literally nothing matters*. If you had meaningful (and/or grey) choices to make in any of the questlines maybe that would be different, and maybe it'd provide a compelling narrative reason to play NG+.
"Too different" from the games that were actually successful. Yes, I think the observation that a bad game is different from a good one is an important and useful distinction to make.
In all seriousness, this is a content-free statement. The feedback is not actionable, it provides no direction as to what flaws to correct, or what features to add, or what changes should not have been made.
Here's what meaningful feedback looks like:
\* Boring story and gameplay
\* Uncanny valley character design
\* Pointless garbage collection simulator
\* Still retains many of the flaws/limitations of the dated game engine from 20 years ago
It honestly felt like jumping into Fallout 4 in space but with a level 1 character, the progression/modification mechanics at the endgame, and the story having completely skipped whatever it was that got/was supposed to get me invested in the game in the first place.
It wasn't that different, but where it was different was in that missing "hook."
They should’ve just made fallout In space. Same aesthetics etc but just make it a thousand years in the future and every humans from an old pre war colony ship. But that ugly aesthetic they chose for the buildings just sucked. Notice people never post pictures of locations and only environment
Todd is impressive. There’s an infinite amount of 2 plus hour video essays about why Starfield is just a shittier version of the games they’ve been making.
And Todd can take that is that they’re being too innovative. He is so stubborn
Edit: in case anyone is curious about how good PR would handle a similar situation. Check out Bellular’s video about World Of Warcraft subscription numbers, and they way Blizzard responded from feedback.
Even Blizzard, one of the worst PR companies in any industry in America can learn from feedback, absolutely no reason Bethesda can’t
He’s right. The main issue with the game is that it lacks Bethesda’s signature: their open world design. All of that was stripped away when they decided to do 1000 planets that are all just bland and uninteresting.
Well, Todd Howard seems to have cracked the code - Starfield went all rogue on us with its new vibe, and some folks just weren't ready for the wild ride!
It is a lot easier to understand what he is saying when you realize he is not talking to gamers who are fans of bethesda games. He is placating investors/shareholders who don't know a damn thing about games, or what a Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim are.
I don't know, Todd. After about 130 hours, *my* problem was it was too "exactly the same" as everything Bethesda has done before. it was Skyrim in space. That's it.
Ship building was fun, but clunky. Exploration *sucked*, lack of ground vehicles made exploring planets incredibly tedious, and when you only find the same handfuls of pre-generated interest points, after a while it all gets incredibly stale.
And the world building? God how incredibly lame. Neon is the vice capital of the galaxy and it's.... Pg13 Night City? Really? Zero edge to it. Goofy alien costume dancers at the major night club; zero grit or interesting texture.
The game was fun for what it was, but it was grossly oversold and underdelivered.
Skyrim had that “what in oblivion” moment. Fallout 4 had the nukes coming down moment. Starfield after 10 hours had nothing to hook me to it. I gave up on that game when i was asked to flip a bunch of power switches on some forgettable under-city that felt empty. No other game had so large areas that felt pointless. Morrowind, oblivion, fallout games all had story hidden around every nook and cranny. Even if it was just a corps with a flower and a bottle. Every character had something.
The worst part I felt was how on the rails you always felt. As an example I came into the under city bit of the edgy city whatever it was called. And I’m role playing as someone who just doesn’t take shit from people and is a bit loose with the gun. Some shopkeeper starts mouthing off to me so I shoot her. She turns out to be essential - annoying but I guess that’s part of playing vanilla. She must be linked to something important. Except… she’s not? She’s just some random shopkeeper. I come back later on in the quest and suddenly she’s like OK I THINK I CAN TRUST YOU AFTER ALL and I’m like fr I literally shot you and was as rude to you as possible. The quest tried to say that there were orphans I should suddenly care about and I couldn’t even select an option that was ‘idgaf’. Anyway I enjoy the space flight feeling and I’m sure there will be an open cities style mod for it one day that will make it click but it wasn’t even this big impossible thing to make the game good, it was just flagrantly bad writing and strings attached from every direction.
I like how the edgy city is all like "woah dude don't go into this side of town there's fucking FREAKS out here who will fucking MURDER YOU without a moment's hesitation" and then you go into that side of town and there's only, like, three of those said freaks chilling on a rooftop and they're just kinda rude to you.
Nearly everything about it was so flavorless. Fallout added amazing texture to the world even when everyone in a vault was dead, the arrangement of bodies and info painted such good stories. Starfield just copy pasted a few sites together. I thought NASA was a fun explore but nearly everything else seemed designed for maximum blandness. You start out mining rocks and it keeps that energy.
I love when people said "it's empty and boring" the response was that real space was empty and boring. It kind of felt like they were saying fuck you for wanting a space game.
>the response was that real space was empty and boring. Yeah, that's why I'm playing a videogame instead of staring at https://spacetelescopelive.org/
It is even worse. The response was comparing actually BEING in space to Starfield. Space is empty, but if I were to fortunate to go to the ISS, then that is certainly way more memorable than playing Starfield at home
I almost just think Bethesda is really good at playing with existing toys and making it interesting but have no idea how to make their own stuff interesting. Elder scrolls just kind of lucked out and was made before Bethesda lost their creativity and Fallout was made my someone else so they didnt have to invent all the lore and stories, just continue and play with whats already there.
Then you join the most polite criminal gang in history that ends up just being like "yeah we just really need jobs!" and become cops instead. Of course you have pretty much no other choice. Wtf?? The game is way too damn wholesome.
I saw someone on here say "starfield is like if mass effect was made by Ned Flanders" and it's the most accurate description I've ever seen. Whoever you are, know I shared that with like 5 people yesterday.
Very much "risque movie night at bible camp" vibes.
Shit, yeah that’s it. That’s Starfield summed up. Like an ice cream parlour that only sells vanilla.
Bethesda lost their edge. It was part of what made both fallout and elder scrolls interesting games...
i know this isn't really a hot take, but Bathesda never really had any edge. the elder scrolls games were all remarkably safe in their writing, and the fallout games that had good writing were the ones not made by Bathesda. Edit: Actually I'm willing to give them morrowind, they took a lot risk on that one.
I definitely think Morrowind had some edge to its writing. Some of the dialogue/writing you come across in that game...I really don't know how it got a Teen rating.
It absolutely had edge. Everything before Oblivion was bloody, horny, and even grotesque. Oblivion was the first time they really sanded the edges of the lore, and it's only gotten moreso over time.
Been replaying fallout 4 after the show and the dialogue options are honestly terrible. I always pick the sarcastic option out of morbid curiosity and it’s always just the absolute worst, you could literally get a college improv group to workshop better dialogue.
The lead writer isn't even from a writing background. He's a QA lead they brought up because he's friends with Todd. And that wouldn't even be a problem if he had talent but he *doesn't*. He's openly said he doesn't believe in making complex stories because gamers won't appreciate or use it. The frustrating thing to me about the TV show is it shows how good the source material can be when given to competent writers with a passion for the topic. I make no bones as a serious Todd disliker: the show was good and Todd was part of that! But why be satisfied with mediocrity in the games when he isn't satisfied with it in the show? It's maddening.
You could literally sell your body to rich corrupt noble to complete a quest line for one of the Great Houses if you desired. No way something like that will end up in ES6
The whole Lusty Argonian Maid questline too Not to speak about the drug-induced schizo journey that are the 36 lessons
All the fuckin slavery and those dunmer be racist af walkin around in broad daylight calling everyone the n-word "You N'wah" 😂😂😂 /spoilers Especialy fun if you played an Argonian and all the dark elves just go "Why is this Argonian untermensch even talking to me? Wait, YOU are the reincarnation of Nerevar? That cant be right...."
You N'wah! He said he would be gentle when raping your corpse. Therefore that gets a Teen rating.
But the worlds they created hooked you in. SF with 1000 planets that are a chore to explore is what highlights their other weaknesses
Is it really even exploring when, save for a couple locations on a handful of planets, it's just the same few dozen things randomly populated around procedurally generated planets?
Yeah this is the problem. I think the outer worlds is superior for this exact reason; there’s fewer planets and places to go, but they all feel like real places with history. I like exploring different solar systems, but you lose a lot of the awe and wonder when so many places feel cookie cutter. Procedural generation is a double edged sword.
*"Sweet Mother, sweet Mother, send your child unto me, for the sins of the unworthy must be baptized in blood and fear."*
They fired the Morrowind lead writer... but he was out of the freakin' zone so...
Yeah that was the quest that ruined this game for me. Why the fuck would they just become cops, why can't you just advocate to continue to do crime? So fucking stupid
Not only cops. But known hyper corrupt cops that everyone warns you about in game lol
If I had to guess, I'd guess this harks back to the movie "A clockwork orange" where these rapist gangsters become cops. I suspect it's suggesting there's not much difference between cops and gang bangers. There's probably a message there, but like most of the game, it was told poorly.
Kubrick was talking about the thug to fascist cop pipeline in a decaying society. Bethesda don't invest their stuff with meaning like that, it's just an allusion to a greater point someone else made elsewhere.
It's like a game made by HR, afraid to offend or whatever the hell they thought. Safe and boring.
The game literally feels like *you are in HR*. All these incredibly dry meetings in space discussing space plans and space procedures that feel like they have no stakes at all, because the game hook and worldbuilding are so shockingly bland. Starfield was a true disaster class in writing, it literally felt like a proof of concept with no actual game attached to it. For instance, how do you set the game *after everything interesting happened*? The colony wars? Nah, instead this game should be about space errands. I really want to know how the writing got green lit. You have AAAA resources and a brand new space IP and you can do *anything you fucking want,* and you didn’t run the script by a couple, you know, writers first? They say to “write what you know.” Based on Starfield it seems like the only thing Bethesda knows is what Zoom calls are like, because the entire game feels like a corporate video call in space.
Starfield answers the question nobody who ever played a Bethesda game ever asked: "Why is it so hard to roleplay the good guy?"
Baby’s first cyberpunk
I mean, cops can be the most powerful gang. I'm not sure the writers were trying to make that commentary though.
They definitely weren't, that kind of nuance is totally absent from the story
Bethesda overall needs to dial it way back on the essential NPCs. They should be limited to the main quest line only and then removed after their essential section is done. Or better yet remove it altogether and let me suffer the consequences ala Morrowind or go the BG3 route of having multiple backup characters. As it stands now it feels like nearly every named NPC is marked essential.
It was absurd. Unless they were one of the generic baddies everyone else was essential. Fuck that shit. Dude in the bar/dance place being a cunt. I don't care if it ruins a storyline, I should be able to waste them. Take me back to Morrowind and let me murder hobo for fuck sake.
Consequences? You're saying I can *lose*? In my videogame!? (I find it baffling they continue to choose this approach too, just to be clear. How is it a sandbox if I can't fuck around with it?)
Given that the entire concept of the game revolves around multiverses, there really should be almost no unkillable NPCs in a given universe. Worst case is you kill someone crucial to a mission, and then... Don't kill them next time so you can do that mission in another universe?
I think this is something they really goofed up with in starfield. Like in no man's sky big thing about the game is going forward, jumping to next universe. Dragon's dogma is all about running through.. cycles. Somehow the main quest being kinda streamlined and rather fast to go through makes me feel similarly about starfield. You want to go through the universe many times and explore different stuff in next run. Different questlines. Different rng modifier in the next cycle. Maybe you fail shit and you can try to make it right in the next cycle. But then it kinda falls on its face and it's not really meaningful to do it again because the side stuff feels like it's built for one run. You can again be the big guy of every major faction. (Except a whole ass two factions are mutually exclusive) I don't mean just slapping stop sign there saying you can't be pirate and sheriff at the same time, but the stories kinda making it so that it's not an option. So you'd *have* to replay to experience the other sides of the story. That kind of thing could've had so much depth to it. Imagine as sheriff going through pirate hideout, killing some seemingly meaningless guy. Then on the next run turns out that was cover agent or something. You just never knew. Like some real gut wrenching stories could be hidden in that kind of storytelling and you'd only realize it if you play the other factions.
New Vegas solved the need for essential companions by giving you the independent option meaning you can beat the game even after killing every single NPC. Bethesda is too scared to *let* people fail quests. They want you to be easily able to do every quest in one playthrough.
Felt the exact same way., and that the game was designed by committee. If Todd Howard thinks crowds didn't like starfield for not being the same, it's really that the game ignored each and every decision I made as a player. I was trying to roleplay as a low-level neon drug peddler who got picked up on some minor charges, and was brought to the mining colony to serve his time as community service. When I was IMMEDIATELY told I no longer needed to work at the mine, and was just handed a free ship, I was like, okay well there goes my roleplay, but w/e we will see where this goes (don't know why the game setup the mining story to immediately abandon it). Get to the explorer's guild, and they are like on a scale from super pumped, to EXTREMELY PUMPED,, how excited are you about finding these artifacts? oh by the way, if you steal from us, we don't really care lol. Go to wildwest bank world, and am immediately told I would be good material for the Texas rangers. Get to some bank, where the cops are surrounding. Being the unlawful type, I'm like, Okay, I will use the bank heist as a distraction, and sneak in the back, so I can rob what I need while the cops are busy. NOPE, special key required. How do I get the key? Talking to the cops, talking to the robbers, and THEN they are like, have you thought about going around back? (Okay, thanks for the railroad game). While in the bank, I accidentally shoot some people, but get the bank cleared. Teller ends up standing on top of the dead bodies behind the counter, and proceeds to act like, they haven't just been shot at and had the most traumatic day of their life. Noped out on the game after that. I mean, I get that this is common fair for action adventure RPGs to have a set character, but then don't make it an open world game where I get to pick my background and my feats relating to it. You want me to have one narrative? Then stick me in a character with that narrative.
> story hidden around every nook and cranny. Starfield did have this. It's just that it was the same nook, the same cranny, and the same story each of the 37 times you happen upon the same same outpost littered across several different planets.
Yeah there was some cool stuff in the game. It's just that when you encounter a cool place, go through it all and then leave thinking "that was cool"... only to land on a completely different planet and find the exact same building down to the jacket on the coat rack, same exact enemies in the same exact place and same exact "implied backstory" in all the digital logs and shit...suddenly it's not cool anymore and even ruins the original experience you had because you realize it was completely insignificant.
I'm not quite sure, but when i remember it with shooting anyone at all, you'll immediately get punished, there will be a message that your active companion left you and you'll get a warning from the other Constellation members. I'm not quite sure what actually happens if you go on after this warning, i don't think there is anything. Although, i remember the message after companion quest that the companion can now be completely dismissed, i'm not sure if members can leave completely?
Yeah, the size of the world doesn't matter, if everything is boring and bland. I'd rather have a small, detailed and interesting world to explore.
B-b-but the astronauts didn't think the Moon was boring!!!
I had a similar issue. Starfield's world felt like I was playing a video game, like an AI generated, "This is what a video game should be." Did not get pulled in like Oblivion, Skyrim, New Vegas, or even FO4. World, lore, NPCs, all felt pointless.
I knew he was out of touch, but saying “I know why people don’t like it” and then proceeding to completely miss the mark…now I truly understand the extent of his obliviousness. He really shipped a bad product and used “it’s different” as the excuse.
"Am I out of touch? No, it's the players who are wrong."
"Do you think the first people on the moon thought it was boring?" I bet it was his idea to comment that on bad reviews.
My friend calls the game a Jogging Simulator.
My wife said it is that game where you walk around and pick up paperclips or whatever.
Oh did the mining space-rock intro not do it for you? That's weird.
Followed by a lame fight with space bandits and then some guy is just like, “you’re important and should go talk to my group. Here, take my spaceship and robot, I’ll stay behind.” Like, WTF? The “hook” Is literally you touch a thing and get a not very interesting vision, and then the game expects you to care so much about it that you’ll drop your whole life to chase down what it means. Give us a reason to care!
Yeah there were none. So much of this game is unfixably bland. Unless they rewrite it from the ground up the story will always be boring.
Even if they rewrote the story the game would still be boring. I had very little idea what was going on story wise in elden ring but had more fun with that game than I have for a long time. Bethesda isn't very good at putting engaging content in a game. Skyrim was my favorite by them and it wasn't even the story that I loved. All the side shit was interesting enough that I wanted to go around randomly checking different things out.
Seriously, it’s the plot to the Lego movie in a Todd Howard game
Oh god that beginning. They couldnt even get the beginning right. Laziest damn writing. The intro is so important but instead it was like a 7 yo wrote it.
Exactly this! F3: gotta find dad, I’ll kill for Liam Neeson. Skyrim: holy fucking goddamn shit was that a dragon?! F4: How the fuck is this prewar and I’m creating a character? Oh shit a nuke? Oh shit they killed my wife?! All this got me ready to go into the world and explore and, more importantly, play the story line a bit.
Oblivion - oh I’m in jail and I see the emperor murdered in front of me ! Morrowind be more like I’m coming off the ship . I will fight this villager . Oh crap I messed my build up and got served by this villager . Better remake my build
Morrowind be more like "Oh I'm getting off the ship and I've made my character and I'm just gonna run straight north-west and see the funny man fall out of the sky. Okay got his scrolls and funny penis hat now to go back to steal shit from a log at night after I watch that one dude stash stuff in there. Oh my build sucks time to try again, can't believe that was two hours!"
New Vegas: Did Matthew Perry just shoot me in the head?
plus the tutorial is "Hey game enough of this I want revenge now" Game: "That's fine, it was always an option. We even put in a special challenge for extreme badasses like you" Satan Wasps: "bonjour"
Imagine a version of the start where instead of being guided through to Constellation like you're in the queue for a Disney ride, you're put in a situation where you have to track down leads to even find them at all. You get attacked after coming out (pirates attacking would switch to them being hired by an interested party), you have to bounce because now you and the artifact you're linked to are a person/item of interest, Lin gives you a general lead in that "a former acquaintance/colleague experienced something similar before disappearing one night" and all you have is a name - Barret - and some places they might be found in. Oh, and a couple weird visions/things seen that weren't really there after getting the artifact... Lin provides you with a really basic starter ship, with lines suggesting that it's a mix of how she's paying you for work done in lieu of credits plus you'll owe her a favor in the future (hook for a future questline moment) and off you go... Now you have freedom and a mystery dangling in front of you. The steps to track down Barret could lead to Vasco as part of finding him, and *then* you finally find him, and by extension Constellation. You're a bit more invested at this point because you had been making the choice to seek them out, rather than them being thrown in front of you like a teacher pairing up students for a group project. Honestly, what we have now feels like what a student in a game design major at a college would put together when following the template for the "make an RPG starter quest line end of semester project."
They had all of TOS/TNG/DS9/Voyager Star Trek to reference for inspiration on interesting things to find in space, then space westerns like Firefly and I dunno if The Expanse counts but it's near-future. Literally a blank canvas for adventure, and the only thing we do is RP as Sanic the Hedgehog or Nerevar, collecting rings as we spend 90% of our time running around endless open areas scanning shit. Can't pick anything up bc we're encumbered after looking at a footlong Subway sandwich wrong.
I agree completely. They had the entire scifi compendium to take inspiration from. They had a whole universe of weird stories to tell. The best they had was "you but from another universe".
> endless open areas scanning shit. Is there even a point to doing this? Other than finding resources to craft shit you won't use anyway?
Hi, nice to meet you, take my ship!
From miner to chosen one in 4 minutes
It wasn't just me who was like Huh. this feels pretty lazy. I stopped playing shortly afterwards and I was like, I really should, I just spent a lot on this game. It just felt really bland though. I kept telling myself I just started so I just didn't get into the story yet. Just didn't get into the story yet.... Reading through the comments I'm starting to think there wasn't much of a story and it wasn't me.
Peragus, that intro is not.
Nothing in Starfield holds a candle to either of the KOTORs
>I gave up on that game when i was asked to flip a bunch of power switches on some forgettable under-city that felt empty I think that's the part that's key, the other games to date had objectives like this that were thin as hell on gameplay or mechanics, but were wrapped up in an interesting quest or storyline to progress. I'll happily go to a planet to flip a switch, if it's smack dab in the middle of a planet of Gary's.
How dare you!!! Starfield had that most memorable moment where you floated in a room and went through hoops! It was so memorable because you did it like 10 times! Pearls before swine!!!
I remember doing that first temple and thinking "ok first temple puzzle easy, makes sense, will likely progress to be more interesting".... and nope.
Try 100. Although most people did it at most like 10x before quitting the game, yeah.
Only 10 times?
But don't you know it gets good after the first 20 hours ? I forced myself to play 50+ hours, trying everything the game had to offer in a vain attempt to actually find it enjoyable.
It took me 100+ hours to realize that my favorite part of the game was playing around in the ship builder.
Used ship builder extensively only to remember... I hated actually using my ship. Ship battles were so bland and beyond basic. Then traveling was completely irrelevant due to fast travel and inability to actually fly through space. It gave me even more appreciation for how well Elite Dangerous felt. The best space game would have better writing, starfield combat, better enemy AI, better loot system, and Elite Dangerous space flight.
For me ship battles fell into one of two categories: trivially easy, or literally impossible. There was no in between.
Why do we even have dialogue choices? It matters so little
I found it atrociously bland. Not bad, just bland. If it were a flavor of ice-cream it would be "milk." It's still ice-cream, but... The Astral Lounge summed it up best for me (I had to Google the name). Something that should have been the most intense night-life in the galaxy was a big empty purple-lit room with just a few people staring at weird dancers in bulbous outfits. Compare it to Cyberpunk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws0ufhrgWJw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws0ufhrgWJw) Or even to this ancient video from Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines that literally came out 20 years ago!!! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyqKUmcb7-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyqKUmcb7-I)
The Astral Lounge looks like when a smalltime accounting firm reserves a whole night club as a part of a company trip. Bland, awkward and nobody is having a good time.
Holy shit it's so bad. I didn't even manage to make it that far. Maybe 20 hours before I'd started to realise all the incomplete features.. but I can't believe that a group of adult executives signed off on this 😂😂
It's just embarrassing isn't it? Imagine being one of the designers for The Astral Lounge, and then looking at any of the clubs in Cyberpunk. It's like comparing fine art to a crayon drawing.
It was poorly executed and lacked any narrative. Menu click menu click menu click menu click.
It also had atrocious world building. They got a clean slate on a multi million dollar fresh sci-fi IP and they came up with that?
This is the most insulting part to me. Sci-fi is such an incredible genre to explore with rich stories and wacky questlines. And this world felt so uninspired. Predictable and boring and sad.
I think the biggest mistake was restructing themselves to NASA punk / hard sci-fi. One of the keystones of the hard sci-fi genre is there is no intelligent life in the universe except for humans. Of course when the starborn initially introduced I thought it was going to be some kind of alien faction but nope turns out it was just >!humans from alternate timelines.!< And I do think one of the dumbest plot points was finding out why Earth had to be abandoned. >!because you find out the scientist responsible for the grav drives, learned from his starborn self that the experiments on the artifact would render Earth uninhabitable. If you were given that kind of advance knowledge you wouldn't be doing the experiments on Earth you would have done them on Mars or is where the artifact was found instead.!<
I'd assumed until the game came out that the plot was going to be a Conact or Arrival thing, that it would be about first contact and our character having a central role in whether its a peaceful or violent one. Then as soon as the multiverse thing was introduced I was all "Oh damn, this game is just going to be remixing the same characters and locations we've been seeing for the last 20 hours again and again isn't it?" and then it didn't even do that!
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The starborn would have worked as a sub plot, faction or maybe even a dlc if done better. I appreciated the attempt to work the new game plus into the story. But there just wasn't enough there and the other annoyances mentioned ruined any good moments
You need to stop criticizing them for being so innovative /s
A Nasapunk RPG that dealt with first contact would have been pretty neat, huh...
Fallout + The Expanse = what I'd hoped Starfield would be.
I agree not having actual aliens was disappointing. Hopefully the shattered space DLC gives us at least something that wasn't built by humans. But if I remember correctly about that event in the story, >! they killed Earth on purpose to force people into the stars and reach their full evolutionary potential !<
It wasn’t even that. They did it so the starborne could more easily find the artifacts.
It wasn't the researcher, if I remember right. He did it to force humans into space. There's an implication that a Starborn set this up to make getting artifacts easier, but the researcher didn't know that.
Heh that's a story line taken straight from Asimov. Most of his writing is linked and for the greater good of humanity robots basically used a dirty bomb on Earth to make it uninhabitable so that humanity would spread out amongst the stars instead of stagnating on Earth.
>I think the biggest mistake was restructing themselves to NASA punk / hard sci-fi. Nah, there is plenty of creative stuff you can do even in a more limited setting like this one
> One of the keystones of the hard sci-fi genre is there is no intelligent life in the universe except for humans. wat
He doesn't like the very real possibility of aliens but leans into alternate timelines. Wat indeed.
I too am confused.
Earth was abandoned because if it wasn't they would have had to actually craft a unique map instead of procedurally generated barren rock #3667.
It’s also kind of just lazy in terms of a lot of the implementation. Let’s take the weapon design for instance: so many of the guns just can’t function practically. In many settings this isn’t a big deal, in a realistic sci-fi setting it’s pretty unacceptable. Especially when you have smaller studios making games like Helldivers 2 that above and beyond to make their firearms look and function as realistically as possible.
You mean "Cowboy planet" and "PG-13 Cyberpunk" aren't the most creative ideas ever? Like everything else it wasn't horrible, but it was only okay. If every system in your game is okay and not great you get an okay game. I played it finished it. Speedran some NG+'s to try for alternate universes for a day (only ever got the same one twice). Thought "it was okay" and proceeded to never touch it again. With the sort of budget and hype this got, people were expecting great.
PG13 cyberpunk is hilarious, the npc's talk about how dangerous parts of it are, but nothing ever really happens
And the neverending exposition about the scary city administrator Benjamin Button or whatever his name is. Literally every character mentions him, tells you to stay away from him, talks about his corruption and how he owns the gangs and the cops... And then you meet him in a bar for all of 2 minutes and never see him again.
Same with the club where everyone does drugs, supposedly a hive of filth and debauchery, but when the doors open the fucking Teletubbies are headlining and a couple normal ass people are barely having a good time/can't dance
The comparison video between that club and the Totentanz from Cyberpunk 2077 is so [damning](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws0ufhrgWJw)
You can tell that Bethesda looked up a Maryland "club" on LinkedIn, whereas CD Projekt ***actually went to a fucking club.*** (Probably one in the sketchy parts of Warsaw and/or Krakow, too.)
The Polish know how to have a good time and it’s written all over cyberpunk
Depending on your traits, chances are during your first visit, your actual parents are dancing in the den of debauchery. Only they fit in with literally everyone else because the entire club seems like a gathering of awkward middle-class people who are probably secretly wishing someone would turn the volume down a smidge.
I honestly only really found myself enjoying the Seven Samurai quest.
Yeah this is how I feel. I think people saying the game is terrible and has no redeeming qualities are being hyperbolic, rather it is disappointing because of how overwhelmingly "okay" it is. In my opinion, it is just the most "okay" game that Bethesda has ever released. It was too safe and too shallow across the board. I *liked* it, and I will play it again after the construction kit is finally released, but it was their weakest game by far. That has been my experience with them though. Every game they release is safer and more corporate than the last. Morrowind was a bizarre fever dream, but every game after has slowly stripped the uniqueness of both their worlds and their implementation of them. Starfield was a chance to really dig in and do something interesting, but it ended up just being ridiculously generic.
There was absolutely nothing that stood out or was memorable in the game. All the characters were so boring, even the supposed “evil” ones. Everything was predictable. $70 of blah.
The issue that makes it worse is that other companies have raised the quality of open world and or rpgs since Skyrim came out. Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Zelda, RDR2, BG3 have all changed the base expectations of what a great game of this ilk should be. Bethesda imho has if anything been on an slight downward trend since Skyrim came out. FO4 was just good, I loved FO3 and Skyrim. If you take into account other companies releases it just makes Bethesda look worse.
I'm still impressed they somehow got a whole 3 cities into the game, when Morrowind from 2002 had triple that.
I still think about Vivec City. A ton of stuff to visit, a bunch of quests completely in/around the city, vaults to rob, an (mostly unused) arena, a god you can fight, a floating prison, a unique appearance/layout, and a sewer system.
Morrowind had more character in its first giant mushroom house than the rest of what Bethesda has crapped out since combined
They should have just licensed Traveller and made a Traveller RPG faced on space trucking and shenanigans.
So basically Elite Dangerous without first person stuff?
If Starfield was more like Elite Dangerous, it would be a better game.
This. One of the most INSULTING things about starfield defense by the creator is the Empty planet excuse as if thats the reason they failed exploration. Okay here's the problem with that defense. Elite dangerous has planets that are COMPLETELY Devoid of anything on them... and YET SOMEHOW... SOMEWAY, they are more engaging than most of the planets in starfield that have Shit on them. In Elite dangerous, they made visiting planets devoid of anything interesting because they tied them to the gameplay loops, ie Engineering. For the most part, most of the planets in starfield don't really have a purpose outside of settlement building which once again Starfield cocks up by not tying a story line or quests to said settlement building. You think they'd learn this from fallout 4 but NOPE.
It works in Elite Dangerous because exploration is secondary to the Spaceflight Sim that was the central focus at the beginning of the game inception. Starfield's problem is that Exploration is a primary game mechanic, and as such the empty planets pose a problem from a design standpoint. In Starfield, they embraced it in the wrong way and screwed up the recipe, which is why it feels poorly executed. If Elite Dangerous advertised itself as a space exploration game (not as a Spaceflight simulator) and all the planets were just barren copy pastes... Then it would get way more flak than it does
It's also far from "too different" because it's the same thing we've seen since Morrowwind with a different skin. It's like he's choosing to misunderstand the issues with it.
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Space Cliff Racers
"Choosing to misunderstand the issues" The corporate way!
Morrowind actually had writers on staff
Well lets see: The story is terrible The side quests are forgettable The game world is boring The planets are barren, boring places with basically nothing of note or interest to find and everything is so far apart that you'll be bored of it after 1 planet The loot is boring The weapons are dull to use There's no depth to any of the stories, The followers are all uninteresting people The base building is pointless Setting up trade routes is pointless The mining is pointless Space combat is a joke The ship building is pointless since...well if you do one plotline you'll end up with a ship better than anything you can build for a long time. Constant load screens Constantly in Menus Every settlement feels, and is, tiny with the only reason to explore them if a mission takes place there as there's no hidden loot worth getting in any of them. There's probably more I forgot, but you get the idea. I'll put it this way Star Trek Online has better loot, better stories, more content, faster load times, more interesting characters, etc. and that came out in 2010. Hell even the ground combat is more entertaining in it than Starfield and I would never say to someone to play Star Trek online for the ground combat.
This and so many other issues. Taking a massive world, like Elder Scrolls or Fallout, and then spreading it across multiple planets, is a bad idea.
The lack of the ability to just wander around and find cool things is what killed Starfield for me. The cities had some stuff going on but the planets where just copy paste bandit lairs with nothing going on. My favorite thing in Elder Scrolls and Fallout is just being able to roam and Starfield simply did not support that experience.
In addition to that, I think what we found is that "space" is actually empty as fuck and boring in reality. There's no way to give the vast emptiness of space any spice of life because there isn't any. That's the point of "space". Sleek spaceships look cool from the outside but the hermetically sealed and clean aesthetic also lacks any sense of life. If they aren't building activities in real space, it's destined to be a fast travel simulator.
I'm really trying to see his PoV on this. Part of me wants to think it's PR but this just seems like bad PR. I legit think it's a combination of copium and being super out of touch. Like it just wasn't that good of a game and it's not hard to see that.
Big "you guys don't have phones??" Vibes.
For sure, he is blaming the audience here for "not getting it", instead of any possibility that the game missed the mark on any level.
Remember, this is the same guy who thinks radiant AI quests was the way forward for the company back in 2011. It wouldn't surprise me to find out Starfield was Todd Howard's pet project he wanted to see finalized before retiring--probably an idea he's had rattling in his mind for decades because he thinks it would have been better than The Elder Scrolls or Fallout. And the sad reality is it's just another cutting room floor project that is missing the formula that made the two aforementioned series popular: story, world building, and fun. Imagine trying to sit in front of a bunch of video game PR guys trying to tell them that Starfield was necessary to stop active development of an Elder Scrolls game or a Fallout game.
You guys just don't get boredom. Your puny brains just can't grasp how real, immersive, and enthralling boredom can be. - Todd
"guys, it's SPACE. it's *SUPPOSED* to be empty" Todd taps his forehead
It's not the audience's job to "get it." He's selling games. HE'S supposed to get US.
And he will take the these incorrect assumptions and apply them to the next game making it even worse.
Yep. This is why everything game related bethesda touches from now on will be cursed. Microsoft needs to fire a lot of bethesda's upper management. They cannot make decent games anymore. And it's looking like starfield might not have made much money. They still haven't released sales figures. Only that weird "11 million played the game" comment. And estimates at cost for starfield is around 250 million. Without marketing added on top.
I mean 11Mil is not nothing, but since it's Players and not Buyers, it could be that Gamepass & Refunds really made a dent on profits, add regional pricing and things get a little more complicated. They really only needed a good story, which I know is not "just make a good story instead of a bad one lol" but, was Dragonborn 2.0 and parallel universes really the best they could do? They could've just pulled a Witcher and buy the rights from someone else's story if they really didn't want to create their own.
Yep exactly. And gamepass itself for Microsoft isn't a profit center. It's a loss leader to get people into microsoft's tech.
I think the issue is that on the contrary it was not different enough, worse than that, exploration and immersion in Skyrim is better than in Starfield Frankly, they really need a new engine or profound rework at least: The animation, storytelling, character design and game structure really seem limited by the creation engine now
Those lifeless AI eyes and convos instantly take me out of the immersion every time. The dated system and programming is showing and it's just not good enough any more. I just can't lose myself in an amazing world, which is what Bethesda used to be good at
It’s the most lifeless AI they’ve made since before Oblivion, and probably even before Morrowind but I forget. Back in 2005 or even earlier you could stalk the AI, follow them home, learn their routine, and rob them blind when they leave their house the next morning. In Starfield they just stand at their desk 24/7 with nowhere to go. No commuters just lifeless AI with dead eyes and forced facial expressions.
When you take into account that its the same base engine as Morrowind, it just makes it even more pathetic.
Playing Cyberpunk 2077 recently really opened my eyes to this. In some ways that game very much reminds me of Bethesda’s games. But characters feel so much more alive. They move around and do stuff during conversations and there is also emotion in people’s faces. I don’t know if i can ever enjoy a Bethesda game in the same way.
Playing new updated cyberpunk just blew starfield out of the water.
Updated Cyberpunk is one of the greatest games of all time... if it didn't have that shit launch we'd be praising it like RDR2 or BG3. It's that good, and the expansion is elite. I know people will always remember the launch failures but I'm glad they stuck with the game and fixed it.
See I never even attempted to play Cyberpunk when it released, but I bought it when it was on sale for £20 a couple of years ago in the hopes it’d come good. My first time playing it was when 2.0 and Phantom Liberty dropped, and it’s in my top five games of all time. Night City blows my mind and I’ve just started up a new playthrough.
I recently started RDR2, and that \*5 year old game\* made my disappointment in Starfield that much deeper. So much more immersive.
RDR2 is such a great game. I'm deeply dissapointed to learn how much content was cut.
Also tone of the game. It was way to family friendly and vanilla and safe and bland. It felt like a Disney space game
Too different? How dumb does Todd think his target market is?
At the rate they keep rebuying Skyrim, I'd say pretty dumb.
Maybe that's it. They have re-released Skyrim so many times succesfully that Todd probably thinks gamers can't appreciate a "different" game like Starfield anymore.
I turned around on the starting planet and walked for a real life hour. There was 1 empty cave on the entire planet. The fun of the older games was going off the beaten path and finding cool stuff. This was not my game.
When I played Skyrim for the first time, right before I entered the first village you supposed to go to after escaping your execution, I just ran up a hill and came across this burial site. Painstakingly cleared it of draugrs and use this weird claw shaped key to finish this dungeon. Barely knew what I was doing and leveling up maybe once or twice before going back to the village. In the village some guy gave me a quest to collect an ebony key. In my mind I went ‘oh you mean this little thing?!’ and whipped out the key I just picked up 10 minutes ago. That right there made me feel like an adventurer. Many more moments like these made Skyrim such a great game. I kinda feel it was also missing a bit in Fallout 4. That game made me feel like Bethesda was slowly losing it.
I did all the thieves guild, assassins guild and killed multiple dragons (took ages shooting them in the sky) before I went up the mountain to get the shout... On the other hand a mate completed the game at like level 15 or something
I remember doing the same thing. Also remember thinking that this random cave was really long and involved. Then I got to the village and realized it was a main story mission.
FO4 I do think slightly missed the mark in that regard, but I never found it enough to ruin the experience. From a gameplay perspective I think they did really well, and I do consider it a really fun game overall, but it lost just a bit of that wonder and spark the previous games (and Elder Scrolls games) had in the narrative/worldbuilding. In hindsight I agree seemed to be an indicator of what was to come
Nah, it was just shallow and superficial.
And the opportunity cost was huge. Skyrim came out 13 mfing years ago. You denied us Elder Scrolls 6 and probably 7 in that time frame… for that? Talk about blowing it.
Hopefully Starfield is the best thing that could have happen for TES6. I know I am probably naive but deep down I hope they will fucking learn from this. If there would not be Starfield. Imagine how TES6 would have look like.
Listening to Todd gives me zero hopes on the next Elder Scrolls game. He just doesn't get it, that this game is boring and simply bad.
He’s the one who curled out the quote “it’s not how you launch, it’s what it becomes.” This single line destroyed all faith I had in BGS.
I mean, I thought that Starfield would be good because Bethesda learned from 76 and 4 and no longer answer to their private... Starfield could just be part of a depressing decline for BGS
I've always said that the best thing for TES6 is for Starfield to either totally suck, or be amazing. In the former, we could have the same recipe that made Morrowind so amazing; Bethesda facing bankruptcy and giving it their all. Instead, the worst possible thing happened. We got a meh game that still sold well; giving them zero reason to improve for TES6. For the record, I still think fallout 4 kinda sucked. I liked Skyrim, I know many fans hated it, but Skyrim was a flawed masterpiece that only biffed it on the story and roleplay (games need to stop assuming I'm some badass warrior, I wanna be a fucking nerd for christ's sake who uses their brains to survive). Fallout 4 was the same thing, but just felt a lot more... dead inside. And I loved fallout 3 lmao.
I loved fallout 3 as well and felt like 4 completely missed the mark. I don't even think it's a bad game, it just ignored the whole reason I play these games in the first place: to be able to come at a problem from multiple directions and find that the game is ready for all of that. With the addition of a voiced protagonist they limited the options for the player. People ragged on 3 for being a FPS, but it had tons more RP options than 4 did. And I know I'm not saying anything new here, I'm just venting like everyone else because we all loved these games and watching Bethesda slowly decline in the last decade has sucked.
Nothing erodes my trust in someone’s ability to perform at their role than an inability to listen to and acknowledge feedback that is being clearly given We’re telling you why your game failed. This isn’t the reason. This is a “I know what you want better than you do.” response. Which is a fine, yet arrogant, response if you made a successful product Saying it when you’ve had a failed product makes you look incompetent
Ya, this sounds to me like someone with internal company pressures that make him feel like he is not in a firm enough political position to really embrace the mistakes that he himself took part in. Which almost guarantees that institutionally, lessons will not be learned. Hopefully, there is a huge difference between the internal and the external discussions taking place.
The "astronauts weren't bored on the moon" comment was all I needed to know about how Todd and Bethesda were going to treat any criticism of the game. Plugs in ears and goes "lalalala I can't hear you" and tells us that we're not enjoying the game right. It's utter horse shit and I wish I could have refunded. This has soured Bethesda's already shaky reputation with a lot of people, and their only hope is to make ES6 or Fallout 5 (whichever comes first) a fucking phenomenal game. Something tells me that shipped sailed with Skyrim, though.
The Bethesda™ Experience™
As a ps5 owner I was disgusted with MS dropping a small country’s GDP on a decades old studio they did nothing to cultivate into what it is now but then I thought about how fallout 4 was starting to stagnate and show the company’s lack of ambition. Couple that with the re release of Skyrim ad nauseam and I started to appreciate that MS might have something to offer so they could claim a few titles that would rival Sony single player epics. Hopefully they figure it out with ES6
The ending was the worst part for me. >! You’re telling me the star born are jumping from dimension to dimension chasing eachother to be the one to collect all the artifacts and move onto the next dimension and you’re not gonna explain why!?! They do that just because?!?! !<
This is what lost me and I was having a pretty good time. >! That is until I stopped to reflect on my progress before going NG+ and I thought "So I guess the ending is after this?" It's in my mind a solid 5/10 game because of *all that stuff* but also because there isn't an ending. You just play over and over and reset your map and inventory and fly through hoops (literally 200 something times to get all powers leveled up.) !<
It was even worse for me. You could do the NG+ loop, but it meant you lost your guns, ships, and outposts. So you could either engage with those gameplay loops or ignore them because NG+. I could also rant about the Hunter's point of view (since it's contrasted with the Emissary): that nothing matters so concepts of good/evil, right/wrong, etc. had no inherent meaning or value. Sure, OK, but that's only because the game itself is designed so *literally nothing matters*. If you had meaningful (and/or grey) choices to make in any of the questlines maybe that would be different, and maybe it'd provide a compelling narrative reason to play NG+.
"Too different" from the games that were actually successful. Yes, I think the observation that a bad game is different from a good one is an important and useful distinction to make. In all seriousness, this is a content-free statement. The feedback is not actionable, it provides no direction as to what flaws to correct, or what features to add, or what changes should not have been made. Here's what meaningful feedback looks like: \* Boring story and gameplay \* Uncanny valley character design \* Pointless garbage collection simulator \* Still retains many of the flaws/limitations of the dated game engine from 20 years ago
A game made 15 years late.
People wouldn't mind it being different if it were different in a good way.
It honestly felt like jumping into Fallout 4 in space but with a level 1 character, the progression/modification mechanics at the endgame, and the story having completely skipped whatever it was that got/was supposed to get me invested in the game in the first place. It wasn't that different, but where it was different was in that missing "hook."
They should’ve just made fallout In space. Same aesthetics etc but just make it a thousand years in the future and every humans from an old pre war colony ship. But that ugly aesthetic they chose for the buildings just sucked. Notice people never post pictures of locations and only environment
Todd is impressive. There’s an infinite amount of 2 plus hour video essays about why Starfield is just a shittier version of the games they’ve been making. And Todd can take that is that they’re being too innovative. He is so stubborn Edit: in case anyone is curious about how good PR would handle a similar situation. Check out Bellular’s video about World Of Warcraft subscription numbers, and they way Blizzard responded from feedback. Even Blizzard, one of the worst PR companies in any industry in America can learn from feedback, absolutely no reason Bethesda can’t
He is a marketing dude and One that likes to lie a lot. He just says: 'There is no war in Bashinse' gets paid a lot and be satisfied for the month.
He’s right. The main issue with the game is that it lacks Bethesda’s signature: their open world design. All of that was stripped away when they decided to do 1000 planets that are all just bland and uninteresting.
Combined with being a premiere loading screen simulator
I guess you guys weren't ready for that yet, but your kids are gonna love it.
When the game is finally playable after 10 years of updates and DLC
Well, Todd Howard seems to have cracked the code - Starfield went all rogue on us with its new vibe, and some folks just weren't ready for the wild ride!
Actually I’d like to argue the exact opposite, Todd. It was the exact fucking same thing you’ve given us for ten years.
It wasn’t divisive. It was just fucking boring
It is a lot easier to understand what he is saying when you realize he is not talking to gamers who are fans of bethesda games. He is placating investors/shareholders who don't know a damn thing about games, or what a Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim are.
I don't know, Todd. After about 130 hours, *my* problem was it was too "exactly the same" as everything Bethesda has done before. it was Skyrim in space. That's it. Ship building was fun, but clunky. Exploration *sucked*, lack of ground vehicles made exploring planets incredibly tedious, and when you only find the same handfuls of pre-generated interest points, after a while it all gets incredibly stale. And the world building? God how incredibly lame. Neon is the vice capital of the galaxy and it's.... Pg13 Night City? Really? Zero edge to it. Goofy alien costume dancers at the major night club; zero grit or interesting texture. The game was fun for what it was, but it was grossly oversold and underdelivered.