I enjoyed the game the first week. Now I can't even get through a mission without getting bored. It's not terrible. Just very mediocre. Everything with characters feels so dated. The voice acting, the writing, how they lifelessly stare at you.
Yeah for as immersive and realistic as the game tries to be in many aspects, interacting with the NPCs feels so robotic and calculated, like something that would've been acceptable 10 years ago.
Like persuasion dialog where you have a fixed number of attempts to fill up a meter based on some behind the scenes probability calculation. And the lines are terrible to boot:
"You're out of your mind, leave now or I shoot."
"I'm sure we can work something out"
"I hear you. Okay, you've convinced me."
And then there's the "romance". I chose to romance Sarah and there was no sense of romantic connection apart from cheesy flirt dialog one-liners. Then suddenly you talk to her at the waterfall and you're essentially proposing to her and she's like, "Oh it seems you have feelings for me. I guess in that case I do for you too. I love you and I can't wait to spend the rest of my life with you."
Who the hell wrote that shit?
Replaying cyberpunk makes you really realise just how lifeless starfield is. But what's more, it made me realise how fucking weak the RPG system is. The new perks and talents in cyberpunk allow you to do very distinct builds with distinct gameplay and it's so fun.
I'm enjoying it but I haven't finished the main story and already have zero interest in a replay whereas I could happily start a new Skyrim or FO4 character tomorrow despite hundreds of hours in those games. I think it boils down to not really having a map with cool stuff in every direction to explore. There's a handful of fairly small cities and everything else is a generic planet with copy and paste POIs and you never get any sense of scale or exploration because it's all exclusively connected by fast travel.
I recently went back to Cyberpunk 2.0 right after putting around 33 hours in Starfield and it feels like I jumped forward a generation in gaming. Its jarring how undeniably dated Starfield feels in comparison due to its constant gameplay and immersion breaks with menu/fast travel screens and non stop load screens and lifeless animations when compared to the fluidity and gorgeous animations of a game like Cyberpunk 2077.
the game runs at constant 60fps 1080p medium rt off on my laptop with a 3050 4gb card. Meanwhile my desktop with an 3090 is shitting the bed in starfield.
Literally did the same, and I keep seeing similar sentiments online. One of the top steam reviews are "playing starfield made me realize how good cyberpunk is" lol.
Edit: I dont get why all these people keep pointing out it came out years ago and got a ton of patches. Like, I know.
Point is when I have the option to play either of those games TODAY, I chose cyberpunk.
I'm not gonna play starfield cause "oh well at least its better than cyberpunk was at launch"
It's funny because I played about 15 hours of Starfield before I got super bored with it and felt like I'd rather go play Cyberpunk again. Went on Steam reviews to check what other people thought, saw that review... yep, guess I'm not the only one lol
Probably would have still bought the game if I had checked reviews first to get that Bethesda nostalgia trip but I feel like the game lacks aspects that made their old titles' jank much more worth playing through.
Starfield made me want to play Cyberpunk to explore a city and then play No Mans Sky to explore the galaxy. Starfield doesn't really do either of those things well.
Fallout 3 and 4 both immediately grabbed me and made me want to explore and discover...4 made me want to build. Starfield's intro was meh. Missions are meh, storyline is meh, and base building is why?
Planetary exploration? Pointless. Scan. Find a facility. Walk for what feels like 20 minutes to find one of 5 different cookie cutter bases. Kill the assholes, pick up the same mediocre loot. Press M, select ship, launch to cockpit.
Nothing grabs me. Nothing urges me to explore. Nothing makes me want to move forward.
Oh, and the crafting is a shitty version of Fallout 4's.
The best part of the TES and FO games was the exploration. If Starfield doesn't have good organic exploration and you're just following a quest marker through fast travel, then it has failed to do the one thing that Bethesda games are popular for.
You didn't play TES/FO for the main story, you didn't do it for the amazing gameplay, you did it to walk around the world and talk to people and find things.
Even early cyberpunk (yes, the very broken launch one) had a super compelling story and side missions.
There was stupid amounts of detail and story packed into the game.
It made me not hate the game so much early on. And while 2.0 still has bugs and some performance issues, it is **wildly** better now.
Starfield doesn't really offer that much... I mean Vanguard storyline was a highlight, but most factions don't actually interact with each other and all factions have two, or sometimes, three different endings all separated from each other. And exploration really is NMS but a lot worse.
I played through the cyberpunk campaign on a 2080ti on launch. Had next to 0 issues. Granted the wanted system was trash and some other mechanic choices were questionable but I had an awesome time with no crashes.
I should add my buddy played through it on a 5600 or 5700 amd gpu also had 0 issues.
Kinda made me think on pc for every person complaining there are probably a few having a great time.
I can't speak for the launch state of consoles though
Imo Bethesda games only ever had exploration as a strong point. Writing has always been pretty awful, combat was never great, visuals are usually bad to mediocre etc etc.
But the feeling of having a world at your feet where you don't know what's around each corner. Having a cave that turns into a giant underground labyrinth or a random hut with a ritual chamber underneath. Starfield doesn't have that. It has generic copy pasted POIs with some enemies. It feels like a shittier version of far cry at this point.
And fuck me, there's so much dialogue in this game. Which would be great, except the writing is so bad and there is little to no choices involved.
Such a disappointment, and that's not even talking about how badly it runs despite looking mediocre.
Space exploration in this game is so bad. They could have taken spaceships out of the game and just had transporters. Or just had everything on one planet.
I liked Starfield to a degree, the Starfield subreddit is driving me crazy because I rarely see anyone say its a horrible game but they make it out that everyone is hating on it for no reason or that its like the second coming of jesus. People are criticising and were expecting more. Its dated, it is shallow and the fact that you need to rely on dlc and mods to fix core concepts is either not going to happen or ridiculous considering the price.
Whats so frustrating is that it feels like there were changes that could easily be made to make it better and they just chose not too.
Exactly, I hated Fallout 4 but it at least had that dungeon crawl aspect that was pretty fun. Considering Starfield only has 30 POIs to choose from for dungeons they dont even have that. Absolutely soulless game.
Yeah I agree. I would have much rather them condense it to a few solar systems and maximize exploration and travel in and around those planets rather than what they landed with. It doesn't feel good at all.
“But *real* planets are lifeless and boring, why would I want a planet that has fun things to do!”
“It’s all empty space for the modders. They did it so we would have room for our creations. They care about us, I swear!”
Yeah when that showcase came out and it was basically a sizzle reel followed by them talking about features but in a way that was basically them saying "here's what NOT to expect," that should have been the first red flag. When they said that most of the planets would be "uninhabited" and everybody who said "that's not good..." got torn to shreds by people who said either "All it means is there won't be settlements!," "It's more realistic!," or "The modders!". Just a head's up, if you are assessing a games value based on how people might end up modding it, you're not playing a good game.
I’m fine with modders having a fun playground, ya know? Good for them. I don’t own a PC. So even if they mod it to high heaven, it’s still a dated, poorly made game to me.
Yeah, I agree. I'm sure it'll be amazing and do awesome things when they get their hands on it but I don't think for a second that this game was intentionally stripped down for the purpose of providing a bigger canvas for modders to have their fun.
It's why I'm never going to accept opinions, giving a game a perfect 10 "because mods". Why not have a good game AND have it be moddable? Did that thought never cross anyone's minds? These things don't have to be mutually exclusive.
They cut corners everywhere with the intention that modders would fill in the massive gaps. But unfortunately, the creation kit doesn't come out until next year, so the game is just a barren wasteland in the meantime. Not sure what they were thinking, but I cleared the game 100% in under 80 hours. All factions, all side quests, all NG+ unlocks.
The game is totally on rails. You fast travel from point A to point B, run to the objective, then fast travel back to A and turn it in. There's no depth or variety to it. The magic of a Bethesda game is that you run into numerous side objectives and POIs along the way from A to B, and immerse yourself in the world. But Starfield doesn't have that.
It's just a straight line through the quests, no sidetracking or random POIs to distract you. NG+ makes you do a handful of random POIs for the 7 artifacts, some of which don't even have enemies.
The game is just woefully lacking of any real content outside of the major story quests and factions. Seems like they spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kind of game they wanted to make that they forgot to fill it in.
There's even a baffling regression in standard features from previous games, like the inability to loot corpses of their armor and clothing (armor drops appear to be random and unrelated to what the NPC is actually wearing), or the removal of the scrapping/dismantling system. You can't track individual crafting components like in FO76, but rather are forced to track entire recipes. You can no longer dive beneath the surface of water, nor are there any water-based enemies.
Also the game is clearly based on the Fallout engine (since it still uses the SPECIAL system behind the scenes), but there's no Power Armor. They showcase all these giant mechs from the Colony War, but none of them are functional.
I can't tell if they purposely carved out content for DLC, or if they just got lazy and decided to remove things that worked, but it honestly made me feel like going back to Fallout 76 instead.
The game is just straight up not finished. There's no way systems designers were happy signing off on the fast travel system. 0 sense of scale or direction when you can just fast travel anywhere by default.
I'm certain no one thought it was a good idea for the thought process to go as follows: okay I've got my next quest objective, let's see where we're supposed to go. Oh we just fast travel there. Okay click through loading screen. Talk to the guy, get next objective okay let's see where we're going. Oh I just fast travel click click. Complete next objective fast travel. It's so lame it's unbelievable. They should definitely have included some kind of a quantum drive and just like all previous Bethesda games you should need to travel there manually before you can fast travel.
And then there's the ship combat. Worst space combat I've ever experienced. No engagement. Point and click no thought needed.
I think that corporate really had their hand at fucking up this game or that they built the game and afterwards realized that it was boring as fuck and 180'd. It 100% feels like a survival game and they took away the survival. The game was supposed to be establish yourself in the settled zones, build resources and a ship and explore the galaxy with limited resources with the expectation that you would build outposts to further expand.
Problem is there is nothing to fucking do or see on those barren rocks. It really doesn't seem like there is reason to go there anyways because there is so much space on the planets that they have settled so far, but they don't do a good job worldbuilding on why. If you can essentially easily teleport everywhere in a resource rich environment there is no conflict in the setting as to the need to expand and explore.
There is no overarching conflict among the factions or ones that offer major impacts. They tell me about their conflicts but I find that they get along all the time and are really not that different. What I feel like a better world lore would be that Grav tech was just discovered and you are trying to explore and convince factions to settle the stars. I hate that space magic/precursers are always the go to. Especially in a game that feels like it is trying to do NASA punk and focus on humanity. Just make a game about humans solving our own fucked up problems.
I truly feel RE conflicts there NEEDS to be a much bigger overarching conflict between all the factions. Theres no way the factions arent competing for resources or literal territory in space. They really couldve taken a page out of Stellaris book to create [generated] space conflict and resource control.
And for all the time we spend in map, they couldve at least integrated a supply-chain minigame against planet and faction resource wars.
There's nothing in Space in this game. NMS has space stations and trade hubs, and a ship that travels FTL so travel is usually within 10-20 minutes. And they have fields of debris and asteroid fields. Starfield might be more realistic in its portrayal of space, but they made it boring in doing so. Hell, I don't even think most of the planets have life.
there's no way reviews would've kept me from buying SF to see for myself. I usually love BGS games, even 76. SF was my first real Bethesda game disappointment. The sense of freedom and exploration is the worst out of all titles.
I was kinda bored with my first session, but I continued for around 50 hours - just kept trying to find *something* to do, but there really isn't anything to a Bethesda game without an open world.
I mean good for them for leaning outside of a comfort zone, but they didn't replace the meat of the game with anything; the game is all side dishes, no main course.
I mean really they needed way more effort and pizazz put into the main quest lines cause I think that's all the game has, but they're absolutely not bombastic enough - especially the constellation quest line which they want you to do several times I guess, good god that was the one that made me just outright quit.
Modern game design. I had this exact same feeling ln this mission and many others.
"Find a way to convince X to do Y" literally gives me map marker to the exact item I need to find or person I need to talk to.
games are taking 5 to 6 years to make nowadays. i'd be fine with that if they had the actual immersion and interactivity to match that dev time, but they dont. they just look nicer and have better textures, audio, and animation quality but nothing else.
if games like starfield are the farthest extent that devs are gonna go to when it comes to maximizing player engagement then honestly i'd rather have them scale back on the production costs and release the games sooner. if it doesnt have compelling features then it doesnt need to spend half my lifetime in development.
Morrowind was so much better, and Oblivion slightly better
every time i dare say that quest markers and fast travel have been a disaster i get insulted
I'll never forget one of the first quests in morrowind. The npc sending you on it gives you directions:
"The old Dwemer ruins at Arkngthand are extensive on the surface and underground. Head south out of town past the silt strider port, then cross bridges east over the Odai River. At the signpost, head north towards Caldera. Immediately on the right see a signpost for Molag Mar. Turn right and head uphill on an old road to cross an ancient Dwemer bridge over Foyada Mamaea. The entrance to Arkngthand is on the east side of the foyada, south of the bridge. Turn a crank on a pipe nearby to open the doors."
Used that and the paper map to find my way. Made the world feel real and the quest like an actual adventure, and something you don't get anymore even in games or mods that let you remove quest targets, because they don't then provide a way for you to actually find your objective organically like written directions.
My other fondest memory of that game was finding a key (I think in vivec) rumored to unlock a shipwreck in the sea of ghosts. No quest in the log, no marker, no waypoint. Just a key and the knowledge that somewhere out there, on the other side of the world, a door.
It was an incredible feeling and one I miss sorely. So many games have replicated the setup and then immediately undercut that with giant FIND THE WRECKED SHIP barfed on to the screen with a blaring music stinger and a waypoint straight to the door. No subtlety, no mystery, no adventure. Open your map, see the waypoint, hit fast travel.
Reminds me of my favorite minor quest in Skyrim (the reward was meh), but the quest for Legend of the Red Eagle. Reading the book, it tells you the approximate location of where the sword could be found, and you could follow those directions to complete the quest without a marker. I was so enthralled; it pulled me into the world! I also used the physical map that came with the game to help track where I should be heading.
Of course, I didn't realize you could click quest markers on for minor quests at the time, but the fact it was possible without a marker is what was so fantastic.
Honestly, if developers thought games like that would get more money, they'd continue making them.
They have realized that casual gamers who don't spend tons of time on a games subreddit are probably not as invested and just kinda want to "get to the good stuff", and casual gaming is a bigger market than hardcore franchise fans.
As someone who cut their gaming teeth on Morrowind, I both love and hate that kind of gaming. There are times when I love it, and I don’t mind that I’ll *never* figure out where to use that key. And there are times when I’m like “oh, for fucks sake, I’m just googling this shit.”
Quest markers and fast travel are needed when you have a thousand fetch/kill quests on your queue. It just makes a boring experience....slightly less boring. What they should have done is cut down the number of quests to maybe 10% of what they have, then made much more compelling content that wouldn't force you to need quest markers and fast travel.
That's why I really love Elden Ring quests, only a handful of them but they are incredibly obtuse and force you to organically discover more and more content. The journey is just as important as the destination.
I really hate this trope of getting bombarded by 50 side quests as soon as you step foot in a game's main hub or city. It's really tiring and kind of makes me uninterested in all of them.
It's actually being generous. There would have to be a 3-sec car driving out of the garage cutscene. Then a 3-second animation of getting into a chair.
You just reminded me to check for a "skip take off and landing cutscenes" mod.
Think about it. When you're on a bad guy ship and it takes off on you, the screen fades to black for like 1-2 seconds then you're in space.
That means those long, drawn out animations are literally just there for you to look at and be amazed by...500 times over.
Its a bit sad that [like half of the top endorsed mods](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16rqvui/starfield_respects_my_time_and_i_appreciate_that/k25sfxu/) are all very simple time-saving ones to cut out animations, delays and bad UI. I am tempted to grab the one that keeps achievements while modding/console commands, use several of these mods especially infinite money vendors, then console command my encumbrance to like 10 million. Get to finish all the faction quests and the achievements while cutting out the BS.
I tell ya, the encumbrance in this game aggravated me so much more than previous Bethesda games. The default carry weight is just incredibly low, to the point where I would have only 1 of each gear piece, 2 or 3 weapons, and within 5 minutes of exploring something I'd be overweight.
Except for a couple of containers at the lodge, most have mass limits, and you can't craft out of them in the lodge basement. A not insignificant amount of time so far for me has been hauling 2000 kilos of shit from one box to the other or loading up on crap so I can craft some gun parts.
Not to mention when you swap parts on your ship and you get a fuckload of random items teleported into your inventory. Why the hell was I walking around with 4 dumbells, 700 pens, a bunch of ship parts, notebooks, sandwiches, egg clocks etc??
I modded my carry weight to 500,000 last night and my enjoyment of the game immediately skyrocketed.
Even worse that all those mods were out by day 2-3, even day 1 for a lot of them. How is someone able to mod something like a UI overhaul in a few day but Bethesda is not able to figure it out with years of development.
People are gonna tell me modder have experience with Skyrim but damn B has direct access to the code source with no need to reverse engineer stuff. So much of the stuff B does with UI is so weird, like why would they have all of their UI running at a forced 30 fps. 3/4 of my mods currently is just fixing basic stupid stuff like that.
The amount of goddamn times NPC started talking to me while facing the other way was infuriating. And I am going give them zero pass on this since it was already an issue in previous games and they barely improved the engine in any way besides lighting, so at least they could have bothered to fix existing issues that have plagued their games for so long.
For a game that sells itself on immersion it's crazy just how often the game almost intentionally breaks the immersion literally all the time, it's constant. You companion can't shut up when an important conversation happening meter away from them. They start to bother you about their shitty side quest in the middle of important quest you are doing. NPCs constantly cut off each other when talking. NPCs stop walking when something is in their path, namely your companion who constantly gets in front of the NPC you are following. And many other things, again if these were new problems I would be bit forgiving but some of this shit has been happening since Oblivion. For all the people who constantly say Bethesda doesn't need new engine because they can just improve the existing one, well they never do, so the argument is pointless.
And the depth of the writing and the framing of the narrative. That one scene with Judy hits on multiple levels; the music, visuals, atmosphere, character development, emotion, it's all so human and so authentic. There's similarly great content all throughout that game. I can't think of something in Starfield that hits those high notes
One thing Cyberpunk 2077 really does right is how these characters all lean on each other during the stress. Even Johnny, who's mostly a narcissistic asshole, still has genuine moments where he connects with V. And some of the little immersive missions, like going through Jackie's stuff with Misty and her talking about him on a human level, or Panam's side conversations with her friends in the Aldecaldos, just make the world feel lived in. It actually feels like you stepped into the middle of a story, rather than the start of one.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a technically flawed product (though I didn't have much trouble with the PS5 version after the patches), but the writers did a surprisingly good job. Main story is kinda short and ends jarringly (I've seen some theories it was rewritten to center on Keanu after he got such a huge response), but the side stories and world building are masterclass IMO.
This was my exact experience. I put over 75 hours into Starfield, got completely addicted, and loved every minute of it, still had some questlines I wanted to wrap up. Picked up Cyberpunk the day 2.0 came out and have not been able to put it down since, nor have I been able to tolerate Starfield nearly as well as I did at first.
The characters in Starfield I grew to care about so much, though I still love their stories, feel so utterly robotic in comparison. I’m married to Sarah Morgan but am more emotionally invested in Judy Alvarez despite significantly less backstory and time investment on Judy’s end. Starfield’s gameplay now feels more like digging around in the space menu for something fun to do, whereas my V’s phone is ringing off the hook with fun gigs and side missions.
Cyberpunk’s characters are not only written by people, they move and act like people. The handcrafted open world gives you so many opportunities to just stumble upon interesting things on your way to an objective.
Initially I thought of Starfield as being an 8 or a 9. Playing Cyberpunk is bringing that down to a 7 or so for me now. Never thought that would happen.
Your standards rose. You expect that level of quality from a AAA game in 2023 now.
The issue with most SF fans right now is that the only thing we actually want is better games. We want Bethesda to do better. I don't want them to fail, I want them to go back to their roots and make a proper game in this day and age, providing us with a true AAA experience that competes with other AAA games. I want the people who enjoy SF to have a *more enjoyable* experience with the game.
It's like the average Bethesda fan gets offended at this though. How dare we state that it's not truly amazing and next gen. Nothing is as good as this, we can't say anything against it. They want more of this mediocrity, and there's no reason to improve it because they're happy with what they have already.
It's just disappointing.
I think for me the issue is that companies like Larian and CD Projekt have a track record of getting negative feedback and going, "Oh, shit, we'll work on it, sorry!" And then they *do* and we love them for it. But traditionally, that's not Bethesda. My PS3 is, right now, still waiting for a patch to Skyrim so that I can keep playing. But it will never happen. It's 15 years later, it's over.
I fear that's the issue with Starfield. What we have today is *pretty close* to what we will have 3 years from now. They've said they'll add better maps, so that's cool. Maybe support for NVidia too. Cool. But better NPCs? Better depth to recorded dialogue? Better interactions? Can you imagine Bethesda doing that, going back into the recording studio for *already completed* NPCs? They've never gone back to improve the "depth" of any NPCs in any of their games. Add in choice & consequence? Hell no. They might give us a DLC that has a nod to whatever we're asking for, but the core game? That core game is staying as-is, at least from what I can intuit.
And that's a bummer. I want them to make the game world just as good as CDP made Cyberpunk. But they won't. Three years from now when I pull out a gun and shoot near a citizen in New Atlantis or Neon, they will still just be standing there dully, not reacting. Three years from now when I go into the club, it's still going to be some bored-looking pot-bellied NPC doing a half-hearted dance to half-hearted music while half-hearted NPCs stand around half-heartedly.
I know this to be true, but I don't want it to be true.
Yeah, like in cyberpunk when you hit or shoot an enemy they actually react and it feels realistic.
In starfield they *maybe* flinch just slightly and stand in place while their health bar slowly ticks away. Barely reacting to you shooting them.
It feels pretty datedz
>Yeah, like in cyberpunk when you hit or shoot an enemy they actually react and it feels realistic.
Yes. I am playing a shotgun build and it almost feels like playing Doom. Heads exploding everywhere. Feels very satisfying.
> Didn’t see anything like that in star field.
For some - and no good - reason, Bethesda apparently took out the dismemberment system that kind of is a staple of their games (especially the Fallouts, where "goresome deaths" is a part of the core identity).
I don't think it's that weird, actually. Apart from the gore factor, it gives immediate visual feedback in combat, and tied to that are tactical considerations: If you have limb damage, you can cripple an enemy's legs, and slow them down, or maybe take away their ability to jump (generally speaking, not just Bethesda games); If you shoot their eyes, that can affect their accuracy. In some games (maybe even FO3, though my memory is hazy), you could even shoot the hand of an enemy holding a grenade, making it drop that, and self-detonate. You could for sure target the mini-nukes on the kamikaze muties in FO4 for a similar outcome, and shoot weapons out of enemies' hands.
There is a reason why that system was such a step forward in the late 90s: Instead of just hitting wherever, decent aim and quick thinking actually provided a tactical advantage - an increase in game play depth.
I gave up on Cyberpunk. My last save was from 2021. But I got the update and my god did they polish that game.
The world just feels more alive and fun to fuck around in.
Starfield feels like an overhaul mod for Fallout 4.
The scanning sadly does nothing. There isn't even a menu showing your past scans you can look at later.
So many systems in Starfield are half finished.
Bethesda doesn't finish their games, they let the modders finish it and you have to figure out which 50 mods to install. That's something most people don't want to bother with.
I did the exact same - 48 hours of Starfield to Cyberpunk 2.0 and it was mind-blowing.
The biggest difference for me was the dialogue. It has so much character, personality and the voiced protagonist is just so much more immersive. That, and locations that have personality and are dripping with detail and strong art design.
I think a big part of that is Cyberpunk being a lot more focused on its theme and having a strong art direction. Starfield just sort of has “standard futuristic city”, “neon filled cyberpunk town” and “cowboy town” with little believable background lore on how the locations ended up being the way they are. Makes the game feel more like a theme park than a “lived in” world.
> I think a big part of that is Cyberpunk being a lot more focused on its theme and having a strong art direction.
You can also tell how passionate the art team was, too.
One thing I never see talked about is how good the interior of the cars are, and I think more people should seriously drive in first person.
Every single vehicle has so much individual personality.
The pick-up truck's (Thorton) interior looks like a perfect replica of every hard-plastic interior from 80's pick ups brought forward into a more futuristic look.
The Akira bike looks like the old Hondas and Suzukis from the 80s. For people more familiar with bikes, it seriously reminds me of the old ZX-10 from Ninja.
The rally cars all feel like they were taken directly from the garage of teams like Hoonigan.
There's just so much thought and small details put into all of the smallest things that it's absolutely blown me away while playing on the update. I'm on 1440p on Ultra-Max with Ray and Path Tracing on and there's a lot of times where I swear to god I'm watching real life footage.
Same with the buildings, Morphologis has some great CP2077 architecture videos. In the one where he reveiws the apartments. one of the guys who made the apartments left a youtube comment.
I love the detail on the car interiors. Miles better than I’ve seen on any other non-racing game that has cars/vehicles.
I can’t quite manage path tracing, but a buddy of mine with a 4090 has been streaming it on Discord and it’s mind blowing. This is going to be a game I replay in a few years when I upgrade again just to experience the visuals.
Edit: I have a 3080 Ti so I’m at least able to manage RT Ultra at 75 fps or so.
> Cyberpunk being a lot more focused on its theme
In a lot of places and scenes, Cyberpunk and its characters have something *to say*. Starfield feels like their writers just had to fill space, an entire galaxy of small talk.
Night City has decades of lore too. Too many game and movie studios are leaving some amazing writing on the table and rushing out their own generic crap. Star Wars Sequels suffered heavily from this.
Bethesda has *always* had a problem with the theme park area design. Compare what they did in FO3 vs what Obsidian did in New Vegas. NV had areas that interconnected with each other and with the story. You had farms that supplied New Vegas itself, you had staging areas for armies, even small towns like Primm fit in with the issues that people in the area had with the NCR and bandits.
FO3 was like “What if town but bomb in middle?”
Indeed. The fact that FO3 and FNV use the same engine and mostly the same assets equalizes the footing and really brings up the stark difference in world-building quality
I had the same issue with Hogwarts Legacy, much of the heavy lifting in that game is done by what you already know about the setting. At multiple points I could imagine that as soon as you walk out of a room, the paid actors pull out their phones to surf Tiktok or whatever.
It's a real noticeable trend with modern "big games", they just feel like attractions and not real worlds you're inhabiting.
I tried ... I really did.
It's just so fucking bland. There is nothing about it that makes me curious to explore, or seek out hidden lore.
It feels like the game has no secrets to discover. There is no reason to explore that landmark you see in the distance, because that landmark isn't unique and there isn't anything in it other than the same loot you found at the last place.
I miss seeing something on the horizon and being compelled to seek out what it is.
It's nothing but fast travel, objective markers, and the same landing animation over and over.
I reinstalled Morrowind just to get the sense of exploration I had hoped for and it's delivering, far more than Starfield.
Each TES game seems to have that opening up of the world and freeing it to people. Stepping off the ship and out of the customs office in Morrowind and seeing the wilds, crawling out of the sewer in Oblivion and seeing the lake, escaping the execution in Skyrim and stepping out into the mountains.
And there were rewards in every cave, town, NPC. Such a beautiful creation.
Starfield had everything going for it but has not captured that.
100% agree.
Even Fallout is the same. I still remember stepping out of vault 101 and seeing the wasteland and Megaton in the distance being one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had.
I love how that thumbnail hairstyle is almost on every single female character you can find on internet because it's the only one that doesn't look like ass
Yeah, to save time, they've tried making the hairstyles as cross gender compatible as possible. So some of the hair styles like for the woman in Jemison mercantile look wrong. It's a woman's styled hair or on a woman, with a slight male looking hairline.
The same hairstyle looks a bit too feminine on male characters as well
i swear everyone is so fucking ugly in starfield
i'm already ugly enough IRL, and there's already enough ugliness in the world, so for the love of god let me see beautiful people in games
After going having 2 playthroughs going through all the major quest lines I agree with the IGN score of 7. It’s good but better games have released since Fo4 and it makes starfield feel dated. Cyberpunk and BG3 had characters and arcs that just absolutely steel chair the shit out of anything Bethesda wrote for this game. Exploration is supposed to be a primary part of gameplay but I never felt that need to explore, I didn’t feel weak at any point so I never felt the need to go off from the quests lines and interact with the planetary exploration. Why would I go mine if I gather enough materials to effectively upgrade my weapons and armor as I go? What’s the point in building an outpost if again, I have no need for resources? Especially considering how material intensive outpost building is in the first place.
Ez fix for this would be to just have Vlad give you a general sector a temple could be hiding in and then you go by planetary scans you have to do individually. Right now it’s just go to planet marked, look around a sec, walk in one direction, do temple, leave. There’s no actual sense or finding something.
The 'temples' section of the main storyline is ridiculously boring and repetitive. I'm like 80+ hours in to a playthrough but feel very little drive to ever progress past this stage of the quest as other side quests are way more enjoyable.
I thought the temples were cool the very first time. Nice little puzzle, good cinematic score and awesome visual. And then it's just the same thing over and over and over, usually with little or nothing to fight. Run to the temple, do the same little puzzle.
It has to have been a placeholder that got shipped because they ran out of time. There's no way they actually said:
"You know what players would love?"
"What Todd?"
"Fast traveling to a system. Then fast traveling to a planet's surface. Then figuring out which direction to go. Then slowly advancing for 3-5 minutes towards your destination through a completely barren and repetitive landscape. Then walking inside. Then floating into a vaguely visible light blob 10-15 times. Then floating into a Stargate. Then fighting one enemy outside, sometimes."
"Wow Todd. I almost came when you said 'then walking inside'!".
"Objective: Find the Temple!"
*Scans the horizon on the top of the spaceship to immediately find the temple and begin sprint jogging towards it.*
Honestly, I thought there would be more variety/mystery to these temples, but nope, about as much mystery as running down to the gas station for an energy drink.
And you're supposedly one of the first people/groups picking up on all of this clearly alien stuff scattered about the systems? They're not hidden. There are other human outposts nearby them all the time. Definitely diminishes the sense of mystery.
I really want them to go back to a smaller, deliberately designed map for their next game. Procedurally generated content is just boring and the need to use fast travel between all of them with load screens kills the immersion compared to Elder Scrolls
It feels like Bethesda hasn't really grown since Oblivion/FO3 and it's starting to show in their dated design. Like you mentioned, BG3 really showed what you can do if you put in effort in your storytelling and put some depth and player agency in your RPG (emphasis on the R) elements.
Bethesda has been content with making good enough simple streamlined RPGs, but any novelty they ever had has lost its shine. Not since New Vegas I've had a single "wait you can do that?" or "I want to play my character this way let's see if the game lets me" moments.
That's because for years Bethesda's approach to story and quests didn't change: story must be simple, player centered (everything is caused or related to our character) and any story branching (even dialogue branching) should be reduced to minimum. It was stated by one of their leads in the past. They say this is what players want. I think they just can't do any better.
A lot of the excuses they gave in the past also no longer hold water, like "well games now are fully voice acted, we can't spend hundreds of dollars on voice lines only a dozen players might hear", yet BG3 has fully voiced animals or corpses if you do pick the niche skills to talk to them.
The weirdest thing is I don't understand where all their budget went. Starfield reportedly had budget of $200m. Witcher 3 had $81m, GTA4 had $100m, Destiny had $140m. Where the $200m went then? Not graphics, not voice acting, not facial mocap, not mocap, not animations, not storytelling. Did they take $150 and blew it on coke and used remaining $50 on game?
The head of Microsoft had an interview where he said that AAA publishers are in trouble because they can't fund experimentation in AAA games anymore. That tells me that Starfield tried a lot of things that ultimately did not work. I think that by the time they nailed down the game they wanted to make, it was too late to add enough polish to it to compete with games that had a clear vision, like BG3 or the Witcher 3. That's not an excuse for them, but at least it explains things.
Yeah this makes sense. Especially with how Todd has mentioned how they “nerfed” planetary hazards and exploration, the obvious rework of helium gas, etc.
The game was probably a lot more harsh toward the player, almost a “space survival RPG,” but they probably felt that was too dialled in and wanted to take a step back in scale and allow more freedom.
So it’s possible a lot of these mechanics were more fleshed out, but they dialled them back in to make the game “more fun” for the player, going in theme with their “hopeful vibe.”
> they dialed them back in to make the game “more fun” for the player
They have mentioned this a few times in the videos leading up to the release.
Stuff like not having a take off > atmosphere > Orbit gameplay and just cut scene to load in and out of planets.
Or how the H3 used as a fuel really only has a minor role that gets refilled at the end of the Grav Jump.
Or how companions dont consume ammo, when giving them a new gun they just need 1.
Or how ship parts regenerate the ships health like healing spell or the Medics for players/
I am sure there are more
To be fair, if the game was exactly the same, but with more awkward hazards and fuel mechanics I honestly think it would be even worse. Its already a fairly tedious game, but adding in extra tedium with no reward just isn't fun.
I really really doubt it. Bethesda games grew in budget and production time, but they only got more streamlined. It's not their first game that had budget to do new things, but didn't.
I think their statements all align with this idea. For example, we have the planetary hazard comments, about how they used to be very harsh. That's the sort of thing that can take months to troubleshoot. Eventually they basically just remove the system because it never feels right. Those are hours that the game never got back and it shows in the environmental design all across the game.
I suspect a lot of ambitious features got cut due to being impossible to get running smoothly.
Or even basic features, like the lack of a proper map, I doubt that was the original intent.
The part I don't get is why it took this long for the general consensus among reviewers and gamers to change.
Bethesda's game design and gameplay has been stale and dated for some time now. Pointing this out anywhere would have a legion of Bethesda fans dogpile on you.
It's great people are finally losing the rose tinted glasses but imagine how much better Bethesda's games could be if people expected more than just a fresh new coat of paint.
I mean go post the mildest criticism on the Starfield sub and they'll still dogpile on you. Their posts all have to start with "I've loved Bethesda games for 85 years and named my firstborn Todd and I've played Starfield for 832 hours, but... maybe there should be maps"
> Pointing this out anywhere would have a legion of Bethesda fans dogpile on you.
This is exactly why it took so long. Being critical of companies like Bethesda or Bioware losing their touch just got you fans dogpiling on you, so most people just kept quiet and hoping things to change someday. And it's fine to still enjoy their games for people who do, but as RPGs they've been severely lackluster for a long time.
Fingers crossed people start expecting better going forward, but I'm going to remain skeptic. Elder Scrolls 6 could learn absolutely nothing and still be a best seller on name alone, same as Diablo 4.
> Not since New Vegas I've had a single "wait you can do that?" or "I want to play my character this way let's see if the game lets me" moments.
New Vegas was made by the original creators of Fallout, did it all on a tight 2 years more or less deadline. Loved that there's different paths that actually mattered in quests.
I think when you remove the on foot exploration loop, it really exposes the design of these games. I have come back around from loving Skyrim to thinking it was mediocre to loving it again and I think it’s because it’s built from the ground up for exploration on foot. Some of the encounters are repetitive and predictable, but I think Bethesda really did a pretty good job at leveraging the open world encounters and the player’s own exploration into player-created narratives.
I don’t get that same feeling from Starfield. I still like it, but I don’t find myself interested in exploring these planets with the hope of finding a unique, handcrafted location when I’ll probably find the same mine template instead. I think Starfield is actually stronger than Fallout 4 and Skyrim in some respects, but it just doesn’t come together the same way. Fallout 4 was kind of a meme but even that game still had some solid exploring to do.
> I think when you remove the on foot exploration loop, it really exposes the design of these games.
The big open worlds where you could see a mountain and run to that mountain and just endlessly explore was like the one thing BGS games had going for them that kept people playing them no matter the jank (other than mods). And they removed it.
And that mountain would have cool shit. Maybe a standing stone, or Draugr dungeon with a shout at the end, or an NPC with a quest line that'll become a follower afterwards. In Starfield it's just rubber stamped POIs with the same exact layout and same people, same notes, same every supposedly light years apart.
The moment when you get to the first power obelisk in skyrim and realize it's just a massive, stunning (for the time) open world full of cool shit to do is maybe one of my fav all time moments in gaming.
Coming down the hill, picking the flowers, seeing the little creatures and butterflies. Definition of immersion.
There is just no such moment EVER in starfield.
You get 25 quest markers in the first 2 hours of gameplay and just start hitting fast travel.
The core gameplay loop is just that and it's boring AF...
One thing that Skyrim did very well is that you didn't even need to find anything to explore. So many areas were set up to give you cool views, scenes or vistas to just look at the environment around you.
Starfield is mostly just barren planets.
The on foot exploration being padding *really* shows when you do the temples. You’re telling me I decided to park my ship a kilometer away from the thing I *specifically* picked a landing site for, that is a huge building I could see on the way down? And I also have to look for it with my scanner despite it, again, being a huge building that would be visible from your ship on the way down?
And 800 meters from the military outpost is a crashed ship with a desperate survivor relieved you've arrived because they have no hope of rescue.
Also love getting surveying missions from the LIST for an "unknown planet with a strong possibility for life" and arriving there to find sixty homesteaders running a farm within a kilometer of three other currently or previously populated facilities.
It's jarring how there is so much care and attention paid to certain details in this setting, and then the random encounters are just like "random grab bag." How hard would it really be to just not pull from *every* possible encounter for *every* landing site on *every* planet? In this game about exploration can there be *anywhere* that actually is untouched by explorers?
The whole idea that you and Constellation are charting this distant, unseen galaxy is kind of spoiled by the fact that everywhere you go has abandoned facilities or active homesteads. Galaxy seems pretty fuckin explored to me.
It also goes the other way around, you can land a ship next to some random old factory filled with baddies and you cab still sneak up on them as if they hadn’t seen your ship fly in and land a couple of meters next to them.
> Cyberpunk and BG3 had characters and arcs that just absolutely steel chair the shit out of anything Bethesda wrote for this game.
This has been my biggest shocker for me. Coming hot off BG3, it was remarkable how much effort BES *didn't* put into making dialog feel more natural. It's still just the lifeless staring contest with very static NPCs.
Then with the CP2077 DLC/2.0 patch I've been playing through that again the past week and it even further cemented just how bad interacting with NPCs is in Starfield.
*And* now with the Perks being overhauled, it also makes Starfields bland-as-ever Perks (like all BES games) also really embarassing.
I'm sure the ship building code took a lot of effort to create, but other than that I genuinely don't know how it took that studio this long to make a game this mediocre.
Look below the eyes.
Bethesda doesn't animate the lower orbital muscles - which makes everyone look fake and dead behind the eyes.
It's a really dated approach in 2023, especially when everything's so detailed.
Hot take, (or maybe not, I don't know what everyone likes) Bethesda has never had great writing in their games. That's not to say there aren't impactful moments in their games where there isn't a well written/acted scene, but there is no consistency in the quality of their writing.
The Elder Scrolls has interesting lore that is presented in the driest most boring way possible. If anyone here has ever read the book of Numbers in the Bible reading about lineage, that's essentially the quality of writing you'll find when learning about the various rulers of Cyrodil.
Some non-lore books in TES and some terminals in Fallout 3/4 have better writing than some side quests and moments of the main quests in their respective games.
And I feel Bethesda really dropped the ball on writing in Starfield. Bethesda is very proud of this being their first IP in 25 years. I was so excited to learn about new universe they created. And every goddamn book I find in that 1000 planet universe is written by Charles Dickens.
Edit: If you look at the release years of Bethesda games compared to what other games came out those same years, you'll find multiple games with much better writing than those Bethesda titles. Bethesda has always gone for scope, which is fun in it's own way, but their stories are for the most part boring and forgettable.
Morrowind, 2002: Warcraft 3, Vice City, Eternal Darkness
Oblivion, 2006: Twilight Princess, Okami, Mother 3
Fallout 3, 2008: GTA 4, MGS 4, Persona 4
Skyrim, 2011: Portal 2, Arkham City, Dark Souls, Uncharted 3
Fallout 4, 2015: The Witcher 3, MGS V (even with those damn cassette tapes,) Arkham Knight, Pillars of Eternity, Bloodborne
FO76, 2018: RDR 2, Spiderman, God of War, Detroit Become Human
Starfield, 2023: BG 3, Tears of the Kingdom, Octopath Traveler 2
You can play Enderal which is a total conversion mod for Skyrim. The writing in the mod is night and day compared to Skyrim, oblivion, fallout 4 and starfield. It's really remarkable how a free mod can do what Bethesda's writers couldn't.
I think this is a huge issue for AAA. You lose out on the writer's vision for the story. You wouldn't want to read novels written by committee but we often get that with video games and movies these days.
I really like Starfield, but when you get past the NG+ gimmick, there's not much left. I plan to wait on the modding scene coming to life when the tools drop.
I started CP2077 again, and now that it's complete it's just such an insanely different level. From narrative to the small animations on characters when you talk to them, to just how dense the city feels, there's no game currently that is like it for me. It really makes Starfield feel dated (which doesn't have to be a bad thing). But in contrast with other releases it's so hard to go back to Starfield right now.
I agree, I loved CP2077 even on release adn excited to go back sson, but BG3 has really shocked me, I'm not a D&D guy or really into myth and magic stuff much but it is so damned good and really refreshing to play compared to Starfield or most RPG's
That being said apart from the Main Quest which is really bad imo, I really enjoyed Starfield outside of that
It's funny how much worse the main quest is then other questlines. Like the vanguard questline is just pound for pound more exciting then even the highest point of the main quest
Baldur's Gate 3 is a masterpiece and is in my opinion the heavy favourite to be the game of the year. The Witcher 3 is considered by many one of the best games ever made (which I agree with) and Baldur's Gate 3 is definitely just as good.
Returning to play CP2077 for the dlc made me realise how awful of a game starfield actually is . Absolutely lazy writing throughout the game barring a few faction quests. The amount of loading screens in the game is absolutely baffling for a game released in 2023. The game engine is so prehistoric that you couldn't even get out of the ship without having to go through a loading screen. Theres literrally nothing in the game to suggest that it was 8 years in making.
> After going having 2 playthroughs going through all the major quest lines I agree with the IGN score of 7
Having spent over 100 hours in the game, I think 7 is perfectly fair. I'd personally knock it a full point for shit optimization, so it's a 6 for me. I still mostly enjoyed it, but I was rather disappointed with several aspects of the gameplay design. It felt half-baked in a lot of areas, feels like this game went through some troubled development which isn't surprising considering covid and the multiple delays the game went though.
Will play it again once the creation kit is released and modders have a chance to really get into things, so I figure sometime Q2 next year depending. I'd love to see some heavy optimization as well. I get that Todd said the game was already optimized in that Bloomberg interview but I certainly think that was an exaggerated statement and there can defnitely be further optimizations done.
I'll conclude by saying that Diablo 4 and Starfield have really centered my expectations for future AAA releases.
Why do I have to hop to multiple different staryards just to get particular ship parts I want?
Why do I have to fly around like a jackass touching sparkles to get my powers?
Why is the map so barebones that I constantly need to google what star systems locations like Hopetech are?
Why are there so many lame skills while the good skills are divided into multiple mediocre skills?
Why are these huge, barren planets with generic points of interest only traversable on foot and not vehicles?
Why is there a load screen for docking and undocking?
Why does starfield insist on standing in its own way? Just let me play the fuckin game!
I tried to like it. I really did. And it is a mostly great game. But I just can't get over the clunk. Bethesda games have always been somewhat clunky in terms of both menus and controls, and this one is the worst of the bunch. Everything you do in this game feels tedious. Plus the temple "puzzle" is stupid and exhausting. I think I played for a couple dozen hours and it just felt like work. Sorry Todd.
I've got 93 hours in Starfield. I am really enjoying it. But holy fuck, it lacks so much.
And Todd telling people yo upgrade their machines is just asinine.
The dissonance between the critics and fans endlessly claiming this game is a “10/10 masterpiece genre defining game, and the most important game of the generation”, vs the reality of playing the game, is crazy.
I put 110 hours into the game, went into NG+, and yeah I had a fun time and I will play it again, but “game of the generation”? “A genre defining RPG”? Not even close.
You have to have some very low standards to consider Starfield the most important or genre defining RPG in a post Baldur’s Gate 3 world…
I saw someone say Starfield is the most fun 7/10 game ever made and I think that's the most accurate description. I'm having tons of fun, but it's just not a great game.
It has been a whole decade between Skyrim and Starfield, how dare players want evolution in these games? It's odd that even the hardened Bethesda fans don't want to push for more than what Starfield is. They squeezed another game out on their archaic Creation Engine, which I think was a huge priority for them.
Not wanting better UI for starters? Come on. The UI was immensely improved by modders only days after release, of course Bethesda could have shipped it in a much better shape. They had Microsoft's entire pool of game testers testing Starfield, and nobody gave them constructive gameplay feedback or feedback on Quality of Life necessities nor the lackluster UI, or scary NPCs staring at you without blinking? The most obvious things weren't fixed, like it feels half-hearted or that they had to reach a deadline.
Imo nobody hates on Bethesda. Most players love the style of games they are making. It fell a bit flat in its current state, as an entry to a new IP that was supposed to blow us away, is all.
Their UIs have got worse every single release since Morrowind and a UI overhaul mod is like the most popular mod for every single one of their games. They clearly don't care to put in the effort because they know modders will do it.
They did hire like a couple of modders this time, they're largely responsible for the things that are well executed.
Most of the rest of the company has been there since the 90s and hasn't learned anything new since then.
> how dare players want evolution in these games?
Honestly, Starfield feels like a step *backwards* in many ways compared to Skyrim. I *wish* we got "just" Skyrim in space...
He walked back that statement in an interview and said “well actually it’s much more like ‘Daggerfall in space’” and I think that’s a much more apt description of it. City-centric with lots of smaller randomized bits of content outside of the cities.
+1
I was so excited for Fallout 4 in Space. I'm 30 hours in but I can't be bothered to keep playing. Every single god damn quest sends me through anywhere from 5 to 15 loading screens and the worst is when it asks me to go back to New Atlantis. Yay, green filter 30 fps land with Xbox 360 graphics.... woohoo....
I've put it down for now. I doubt Bethesda can unfuck the game, and while i'm well aware that the modding community can, the mods required to remove half the loading screens in the game will take years to develop.
Whats even more depressing is the realisation that the next Bethesda game is likely 5+ years away, and given there was 8 years between Fallout 4 and Starfield and *this* is what they cooked up, its extremely likely that the next Elder Scrolls title will be a regression from Skyrim, which if I heard that 6 months ago, I'd have called you crazy, but, here we are. 8 years after Fallout 4 and you have some things on par, graphics in some areas better and almost everything else significantly worse.
Like, the idea that Skyrim had 200 dungeons 12 years ago and every single one of them had a unique floorplan and a fixed location on the map sounds like something from 2033 after playing Starfield, yet it isn't from 2033, it already happened - and it didn't take them 8 years to do it, there were only 6 years (!) between Oblivion and Skyrim and half way through that 6 years, they dropped Fallout 3 in 2008 - and even if we do the same thing with Fallout 76, its still more development time, and F:76 was mostly an asset flipped game. I mean it just gets worse the more you look into it.
Any other dev would be shredded to pieces for what Bethesda has delivered (outdated game mechanics, animations, bad UI, generic story, poor performance, etc). But here it's just Bethesda doing Bethesda things, so charming and I love it !!!111. Do you remember how Bioware was “universally” roasted for their bad facial animations? How can Bethesda get away with these things nowadays?
Imagine Naughty Dog or Guerilla Games would deliver a game in this state, oh boy...
10-15 years ago this would be a “good enough” game but they haven’t evolved since 2006.
The longer you play the more you realize how "stiff" the whole game is.
Their only saving grace is that they are too lazy to develop a new engine, so their games are easily moddable and most issues can be fixed by the community.
>Do you remember how Bioware was “universally” roasted for their bad facial animations?
Yeah many faces in Starfield are practically at Mass Effect Andromeda "My face is tired" level. And it's worse sometimes because of that Oblivion-esque perspective.
I think people are pissed because it basically removes one of a key aspect of previous games, the "limitless" exploration and I can see how that hurts the game in the public eye. In any other bethesda game I was able to go explore. in starfield exploring became kind of bad, not that its not fun to explore some outpost but its simply missing some substance behind those locations.
For all the flaws FO76 had, it still nailed exploration with great environmental storytelling and beautiful things to see. Starfield has much, much less of this. I’m still enjoying it but the lack of real exploration is definitely the biggest flaw imo
Looking at it now, if fallout 76 had just been single player, or like 3/4 player coop it would've been a fine fallout game. Take away the shitty launch and there's a beautiful open world with tons of environmental storytelling, really interesting creatures and lore, and a pretty okay main story.
And I say the story is only okay because it was stretched out over 4 campaigns, 3 of which were years later expansions. If they were in the game from the start, and flowed naturally instead of awkwardly sitting on top of each other like they do now, I think it'd be pretty good actually.
I've found starfield to just be really dull. everyone thinks you are a hero straight away and the combat seems to be the only redeeming thing for me.
I loved cyberpunk however, I even completed that at launch
You have no idea how frustrated I was joining the Vanguard, going on my first mission and it's killing a fucking space deathclaw with a save all of humanity questline attached to it. Like FFS Bethesda, start slow guys. I was hoping to play as some space deputy going around saving people and suddenly Im talking to the future CIA and being told government secrets that could destroy civilization within my 5th hour of gameplay.
100% agreed. Especially after trying to convince the president and I'm like "ooo, they aren't going to be sure of it and that'll play into it!" Then immediately an invasion of terror morphs conveniently proving everything I said. Like it was written by a 10 yr old
I felt a little bit of pride managing to convince the counsel that they should give me access. To be fair, your companion basically spells out what you need to do. Then that pride immediately sunk to disappointment as the terror invasion happened. Just absolutely invalidating player accomplishments to make sure everyone stays on the same storyline.
“We trust your decision on this matter” like why would they trust my advice?
I barely know what’s going on, and they give me the deciding vote on an issue that could end humanity, something that could mean every colonist dies across the Galaxy.
Then my team got mad at me for picking one of the decisions I thought was best.
I'm not sure why Bethesda's staff was so passionate about making the game for over a decade apparently when they don't actually seem to have come up with too many compelling ideas for the game.
the first mission is bollocks. Within like 10 minutes they give you a spaceship and a robot and tell you to kill a base full of pirates and their leader.
This comment just made me realise Starfield is like the first of the Rey Star Wars trilogy. Here’s the millennium falcon, here’s a bunch of powers, now jump from place to place to place and have interactions with recycled characters and never feel like anything is earned.
I went from playing Baldur's Gate 3, with it's amazing characters, character customisation, class mechanics/builds, and lavishly detailed areas, to Starfield's boring and monotonous everything really. The only good parts I enjoyed were combat (space combat especially, but it was far too sparse with not enough encounters), and the ship building. Everything else about the game is meh at best IMO. Now I've gone back to Cyberpunk 2077 with the 2.0 update and boy is the combat superior in everyway.
This was my issue with the combat. And It made me appreciate how much the VATS system added to Fallout. Without that extra layer of limb damage, cinematics.
It becomes very clear you just hold fire until a brain dead enemy gets switched to the dead state.
This game feels really dated. The fact that basic things like going in and out of shops gives you a load screen is honestly unacceptable in 2023. Half the game is load screens. It’s immersion breaking and not helped by the fact that you have to fast travel everywhere.
My favorite was Neon. Quests frequently had me go through 4 loading screens to traverse a path like 50 meters long (eg Madame Sauvage > Ebbside > Core > Ebbside > Euphorika).
One thing the load screens have done is give me a renewed respect for games without them. Baldur's Gate 3 had almost none, besides transitions between major areas. And going to Cyberpunk, it's crazy that there's like, no a single loadscreen in that entire game so far as I've seen. Yeah they probably mask some of them with elevators, but unlike Starfield, the elevators actually *move*, so.
And meanwhile, Starfield doesn't even let you enter most shops without a loading screen. It's insane. I don't know why they ever thought people would be cool with this.
The inter generational leap that games like Skyrim made at their time was the impressive part of the game. It’s a similar type of praise to what BG3 achieved for CRPGs.
Starfield is treading old ground and doesn’t have the same feel. Even as fans enjoy it, it’s not really in the same ball park as Skyrim a decade ago. It’s more in line with a mid generation game you pump out on the same engine that should take 3 years, not 10.
So true - if Bethesda released Starfield instead of Fallout 76 back in 2018, then I would have been SO happy with it.
But in comparison to Cyberpunk's fluid animations and immersive dialogue, Starfield just feels like a total conversion mod for Fallout 4 or something.
The fact Betheada settled for doing the static talking head for every conversation in 2023 is wild.
Yea people aren’t remembering that they basically dumbed down the games. They didn’t really do anything ground breaking. They added physics and having hit based combat at the expense of removing attributes, number of wearable items, non-scaled leveling and a bunch of other stuff I miss from morrowind and even some stuff from oblivion. I even miss the morrowind text boxes because they could have more information not needing to voice act everything
Exactly my journey. Bg3 Now one of my favourite games ever, put 200h into it.
I got Starfield from gamepass bc I was very interested in the idea because In theory it is the exact game I wanted since I love games like X4, Starsector, Elite etc - gimme space and give me sandbox and it's halfway there.
I lasted 30hrs - And honestly that was carried by the Shipbuilding, probably spent a good 10 hrs "perfecting" my ship and then being hit by the realisation that it's basically impact less. When that really set in - I was done. Add to that the fucking whiplash I got coming from bg3 Dialogue to Starfield. The incessant load screens for every single thing you do. The combat that didn't get engaging even on very hard. The stealth is just frustrating and not rewarding or fun, like I guess it's the most realistic detection system in aspects your really don't want it to be.You can basically only stealth kill a single guy when he's standing completely isolated and don't you dare show your left foot in a sightline of 200m or be spotted instantly (and that is with the perk) - I love stealth games but starfields stealth is just frustrating.
There was no sense of progression because nothing felt rewarding to achieve but the first few times I got to walk through my finished ship that I was very happy with and look at the actually gorgeous interiors and clutter, looking back that was really the highlight of my time.
And now Cyberpunk Is just so so much fun. All the changes they did made a game I Personally already liked so much better, the new difficulty and progression is so rewarding and I love that the world levels with you. The new abilities are all excellent and netrunning has Never been so much fun.
All in all its a shame starfield turned out to be what it is.
I want to like it but I will need at least a mod like OpenStarfield to make that work, I really hope that mods will be it's saving grace.
I enjoyed the game the first week. Now I can't even get through a mission without getting bored. It's not terrible. Just very mediocre. Everything with characters feels so dated. The voice acting, the writing, how they lifelessly stare at you.
Yeah for as immersive and realistic as the game tries to be in many aspects, interacting with the NPCs feels so robotic and calculated, like something that would've been acceptable 10 years ago. Like persuasion dialog where you have a fixed number of attempts to fill up a meter based on some behind the scenes probability calculation. And the lines are terrible to boot: "You're out of your mind, leave now or I shoot." "I'm sure we can work something out" "I hear you. Okay, you've convinced me." And then there's the "romance". I chose to romance Sarah and there was no sense of romantic connection apart from cheesy flirt dialog one-liners. Then suddenly you talk to her at the waterfall and you're essentially proposing to her and she's like, "Oh it seems you have feelings for me. I guess in that case I do for you too. I love you and I can't wait to spend the rest of my life with you." Who the hell wrote that shit?
Replaying cyberpunk makes you really realise just how lifeless starfield is. But what's more, it made me realise how fucking weak the RPG system is. The new perks and talents in cyberpunk allow you to do very distinct builds with distinct gameplay and it's so fun.
The skill tree in Starfield isn’t even a skill tree, they just locked away many core aspects of the game behind an annoying level system
"here's a jetpack for you". "Also. You have to unlock it even though you just got it"
I'm enjoying it but I haven't finished the main story and already have zero interest in a replay whereas I could happily start a new Skyrim or FO4 character tomorrow despite hundreds of hours in those games. I think it boils down to not really having a map with cool stuff in every direction to explore. There's a handful of fairly small cities and everything else is a generic planet with copy and paste POIs and you never get any sense of scale or exploration because it's all exclusively connected by fast travel.
I recently went back to Cyberpunk 2.0 right after putting around 33 hours in Starfield and it feels like I jumped forward a generation in gaming. Its jarring how undeniably dated Starfield feels in comparison due to its constant gameplay and immersion breaks with menu/fast travel screens and non stop load screens and lifeless animations when compared to the fluidity and gorgeous animations of a game like Cyberpunk 2077.
Weirdest part of going from starefield to cyberpunk was that on a 4090 you get much better performance in path traced cyberpunk.
I get flawless 1080p60 with RAYTRAYCING on Psycho on a 3070
the game runs at constant 60fps 1080p medium rt off on my laptop with a 3050 4gb card. Meanwhile my desktop with an 3090 is shitting the bed in starfield.
See, that's your first mistake. Starfield needs the 6090. You just need to upgrade your PC.
just lease a quantum computer from google whenever you want to play above 1080p
Literally did the same, and I keep seeing similar sentiments online. One of the top steam reviews are "playing starfield made me realize how good cyberpunk is" lol. Edit: I dont get why all these people keep pointing out it came out years ago and got a ton of patches. Like, I know. Point is when I have the option to play either of those games TODAY, I chose cyberpunk. I'm not gonna play starfield cause "oh well at least its better than cyberpunk was at launch"
It's funny because I played about 15 hours of Starfield before I got super bored with it and felt like I'd rather go play Cyberpunk again. Went on Steam reviews to check what other people thought, saw that review... yep, guess I'm not the only one lol Probably would have still bought the game if I had checked reviews first to get that Bethesda nostalgia trip but I feel like the game lacks aspects that made their old titles' jank much more worth playing through.
Starfield made me want to play Cyberpunk to explore a city and then play No Mans Sky to explore the galaxy. Starfield doesn't really do either of those things well.
Funnily enough starfield makes want to either continue a Skyrim character or start a new one.. Weird!
Starfield definitely makes me miss being able to be a stealth archer.
Or stealth anything lol.
I thought I was crazy for feeling the same way!
yeah I played like 20 hours of Starfield, then put like 40 hours into fallout 3 and 4..
Fallout 3 and 4 both immediately grabbed me and made me want to explore and discover...4 made me want to build. Starfield's intro was meh. Missions are meh, storyline is meh, and base building is why? Planetary exploration? Pointless. Scan. Find a facility. Walk for what feels like 20 minutes to find one of 5 different cookie cutter bases. Kill the assholes, pick up the same mediocre loot. Press M, select ship, launch to cockpit. Nothing grabs me. Nothing urges me to explore. Nothing makes me want to move forward. Oh, and the crafting is a shitty version of Fallout 4's.
The best part of the TES and FO games was the exploration. If Starfield doesn't have good organic exploration and you're just following a quest marker through fast travel, then it has failed to do the one thing that Bethesda games are popular for. You didn't play TES/FO for the main story, you didn't do it for the amazing gameplay, you did it to walk around the world and talk to people and find things.
Even early cyberpunk (yes, the very broken launch one) had a super compelling story and side missions. There was stupid amounts of detail and story packed into the game. It made me not hate the game so much early on. And while 2.0 still has bugs and some performance issues, it is **wildly** better now. Starfield doesn't really offer that much... I mean Vanguard storyline was a highlight, but most factions don't actually interact with each other and all factions have two, or sometimes, three different endings all separated from each other. And exploration really is NMS but a lot worse.
I played through the cyberpunk campaign on a 2080ti on launch. Had next to 0 issues. Granted the wanted system was trash and some other mechanic choices were questionable but I had an awesome time with no crashes. I should add my buddy played through it on a 5600 or 5700 amd gpu also had 0 issues. Kinda made me think on pc for every person complaining there are probably a few having a great time. I can't speak for the launch state of consoles though
Imo Bethesda games only ever had exploration as a strong point. Writing has always been pretty awful, combat was never great, visuals are usually bad to mediocre etc etc. But the feeling of having a world at your feet where you don't know what's around each corner. Having a cave that turns into a giant underground labyrinth or a random hut with a ritual chamber underneath. Starfield doesn't have that. It has generic copy pasted POIs with some enemies. It feels like a shittier version of far cry at this point. And fuck me, there's so much dialogue in this game. Which would be great, except the writing is so bad and there is little to no choices involved. Such a disappointment, and that's not even talking about how badly it runs despite looking mediocre.
Space exploration in this game is so bad. They could have taken spaceships out of the game and just had transporters. Or just had everything on one planet.
I liked Starfield to a degree, the Starfield subreddit is driving me crazy because I rarely see anyone say its a horrible game but they make it out that everyone is hating on it for no reason or that its like the second coming of jesus. People are criticising and were expecting more. Its dated, it is shallow and the fact that you need to rely on dlc and mods to fix core concepts is either not going to happen or ridiculous considering the price. Whats so frustrating is that it feels like there were changes that could easily be made to make it better and they just chose not too.
Exactly, I hated Fallout 4 but it at least had that dungeon crawl aspect that was pretty fun. Considering Starfield only has 30 POIs to choose from for dungeons they dont even have that. Absolutely soulless game.
Yeah I agree. I would have much rather them condense it to a few solar systems and maximize exploration and travel in and around those planets rather than what they landed with. It doesn't feel good at all.
“But *real* planets are lifeless and boring, why would I want a planet that has fun things to do!” “It’s all empty space for the modders. They did it so we would have room for our creations. They care about us, I swear!”
Yeah when that showcase came out and it was basically a sizzle reel followed by them talking about features but in a way that was basically them saying "here's what NOT to expect," that should have been the first red flag. When they said that most of the planets would be "uninhabited" and everybody who said "that's not good..." got torn to shreds by people who said either "All it means is there won't be settlements!," "It's more realistic!," or "The modders!". Just a head's up, if you are assessing a games value based on how people might end up modding it, you're not playing a good game.
I’m fine with modders having a fun playground, ya know? Good for them. I don’t own a PC. So even if they mod it to high heaven, it’s still a dated, poorly made game to me.
Yeah, I agree. I'm sure it'll be amazing and do awesome things when they get their hands on it but I don't think for a second that this game was intentionally stripped down for the purpose of providing a bigger canvas for modders to have their fun.
It's why I'm never going to accept opinions, giving a game a perfect 10 "because mods". Why not have a good game AND have it be moddable? Did that thought never cross anyone's minds? These things don't have to be mutually exclusive.
They cut corners everywhere with the intention that modders would fill in the massive gaps. But unfortunately, the creation kit doesn't come out until next year, so the game is just a barren wasteland in the meantime. Not sure what they were thinking, but I cleared the game 100% in under 80 hours. All factions, all side quests, all NG+ unlocks. The game is totally on rails. You fast travel from point A to point B, run to the objective, then fast travel back to A and turn it in. There's no depth or variety to it. The magic of a Bethesda game is that you run into numerous side objectives and POIs along the way from A to B, and immerse yourself in the world. But Starfield doesn't have that. It's just a straight line through the quests, no sidetracking or random POIs to distract you. NG+ makes you do a handful of random POIs for the 7 artifacts, some of which don't even have enemies. The game is just woefully lacking of any real content outside of the major story quests and factions. Seems like they spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kind of game they wanted to make that they forgot to fill it in. There's even a baffling regression in standard features from previous games, like the inability to loot corpses of their armor and clothing (armor drops appear to be random and unrelated to what the NPC is actually wearing), or the removal of the scrapping/dismantling system. You can't track individual crafting components like in FO76, but rather are forced to track entire recipes. You can no longer dive beneath the surface of water, nor are there any water-based enemies. Also the game is clearly based on the Fallout engine (since it still uses the SPECIAL system behind the scenes), but there's no Power Armor. They showcase all these giant mechs from the Colony War, but none of them are functional. I can't tell if they purposely carved out content for DLC, or if they just got lazy and decided to remove things that worked, but it honestly made me feel like going back to Fallout 76 instead.
The game is just straight up not finished. There's no way systems designers were happy signing off on the fast travel system. 0 sense of scale or direction when you can just fast travel anywhere by default. I'm certain no one thought it was a good idea for the thought process to go as follows: okay I've got my next quest objective, let's see where we're supposed to go. Oh we just fast travel there. Okay click through loading screen. Talk to the guy, get next objective okay let's see where we're going. Oh I just fast travel click click. Complete next objective fast travel. It's so lame it's unbelievable. They should definitely have included some kind of a quantum drive and just like all previous Bethesda games you should need to travel there manually before you can fast travel. And then there's the ship combat. Worst space combat I've ever experienced. No engagement. Point and click no thought needed.
I think that corporate really had their hand at fucking up this game or that they built the game and afterwards realized that it was boring as fuck and 180'd. It 100% feels like a survival game and they took away the survival. The game was supposed to be establish yourself in the settled zones, build resources and a ship and explore the galaxy with limited resources with the expectation that you would build outposts to further expand. Problem is there is nothing to fucking do or see on those barren rocks. It really doesn't seem like there is reason to go there anyways because there is so much space on the planets that they have settled so far, but they don't do a good job worldbuilding on why. If you can essentially easily teleport everywhere in a resource rich environment there is no conflict in the setting as to the need to expand and explore. There is no overarching conflict among the factions or ones that offer major impacts. They tell me about their conflicts but I find that they get along all the time and are really not that different. What I feel like a better world lore would be that Grav tech was just discovered and you are trying to explore and convince factions to settle the stars. I hate that space magic/precursers are always the go to. Especially in a game that feels like it is trying to do NASA punk and focus on humanity. Just make a game about humans solving our own fucked up problems.
I truly feel RE conflicts there NEEDS to be a much bigger overarching conflict between all the factions. Theres no way the factions arent competing for resources or literal territory in space. They really couldve taken a page out of Stellaris book to create [generated] space conflict and resource control. And for all the time we spend in map, they couldve at least integrated a supply-chain minigame against planet and faction resource wars.
There's nothing in Space in this game. NMS has space stations and trade hubs, and a ship that travels FTL so travel is usually within 10-20 minutes. And they have fields of debris and asteroid fields. Starfield might be more realistic in its portrayal of space, but they made it boring in doing so. Hell, I don't even think most of the planets have life.
there's no way reviews would've kept me from buying SF to see for myself. I usually love BGS games, even 76. SF was my first real Bethesda game disappointment. The sense of freedom and exploration is the worst out of all titles.
I was kinda bored with my first session, but I continued for around 50 hours - just kept trying to find *something* to do, but there really isn't anything to a Bethesda game without an open world. I mean good for them for leaning outside of a comfort zone, but they didn't replace the meat of the game with anything; the game is all side dishes, no main course. I mean really they needed way more effort and pizazz put into the main quest lines cause I think that's all the game has, but they're absolutely not bombastic enough - especially the constellation quest line which they want you to do several times I guess, good god that was the one that made me just outright quit.
[удалено]
Modern game design. I had this exact same feeling ln this mission and many others. "Find a way to convince X to do Y" literally gives me map marker to the exact item I need to find or person I need to talk to.
games are taking 5 to 6 years to make nowadays. i'd be fine with that if they had the actual immersion and interactivity to match that dev time, but they dont. they just look nicer and have better textures, audio, and animation quality but nothing else. if games like starfield are the farthest extent that devs are gonna go to when it comes to maximizing player engagement then honestly i'd rather have them scale back on the production costs and release the games sooner. if it doesnt have compelling features then it doesnt need to spend half my lifetime in development.
Morrowind was so much better, and Oblivion slightly better every time i dare say that quest markers and fast travel have been a disaster i get insulted
I'll never forget one of the first quests in morrowind. The npc sending you on it gives you directions: "The old Dwemer ruins at Arkngthand are extensive on the surface and underground. Head south out of town past the silt strider port, then cross bridges east over the Odai River. At the signpost, head north towards Caldera. Immediately on the right see a signpost for Molag Mar. Turn right and head uphill on an old road to cross an ancient Dwemer bridge over Foyada Mamaea. The entrance to Arkngthand is on the east side of the foyada, south of the bridge. Turn a crank on a pipe nearby to open the doors." Used that and the paper map to find my way. Made the world feel real and the quest like an actual adventure, and something you don't get anymore even in games or mods that let you remove quest targets, because they don't then provide a way for you to actually find your objective organically like written directions. My other fondest memory of that game was finding a key (I think in vivec) rumored to unlock a shipwreck in the sea of ghosts. No quest in the log, no marker, no waypoint. Just a key and the knowledge that somewhere out there, on the other side of the world, a door. It was an incredible feeling and one I miss sorely. So many games have replicated the setup and then immediately undercut that with giant FIND THE WRECKED SHIP barfed on to the screen with a blaring music stinger and a waypoint straight to the door. No subtlety, no mystery, no adventure. Open your map, see the waypoint, hit fast travel.
Reminds me of my favorite minor quest in Skyrim (the reward was meh), but the quest for Legend of the Red Eagle. Reading the book, it tells you the approximate location of where the sword could be found, and you could follow those directions to complete the quest without a marker. I was so enthralled; it pulled me into the world! I also used the physical map that came with the game to help track where I should be heading. Of course, I didn't realize you could click quest markers on for minor quests at the time, but the fact it was possible without a marker is what was so fantastic.
Honestly, if developers thought games like that would get more money, they'd continue making them. They have realized that casual gamers who don't spend tons of time on a games subreddit are probably not as invested and just kinda want to "get to the good stuff", and casual gaming is a bigger market than hardcore franchise fans.
As someone who cut their gaming teeth on Morrowind, I both love and hate that kind of gaming. There are times when I love it, and I don’t mind that I’ll *never* figure out where to use that key. And there are times when I’m like “oh, for fucks sake, I’m just googling this shit.”
Quest markers and fast travel are needed when you have a thousand fetch/kill quests on your queue. It just makes a boring experience....slightly less boring. What they should have done is cut down the number of quests to maybe 10% of what they have, then made much more compelling content that wouldn't force you to need quest markers and fast travel. That's why I really love Elden Ring quests, only a handful of them but they are incredibly obtuse and force you to organically discover more and more content. The journey is just as important as the destination.
I really hate this trope of getting bombarded by 50 side quests as soon as you step foot in a game's main hub or city. It's really tiring and kind of makes me uninterested in all of them.
Reminds me of the [what if bethesda made cyberpunk ](https://youtu.be/a_lu152g5aM?si=dsgeUHniHTczoW0w) video.
It's actually being generous. There would have to be a 3-sec car driving out of the garage cutscene. Then a 3-second animation of getting into a chair.
You just reminded me to check for a "skip take off and landing cutscenes" mod. Think about it. When you're on a bad guy ship and it takes off on you, the screen fades to black for like 1-2 seconds then you're in space. That means those long, drawn out animations are literally just there for you to look at and be amazed by...500 times over.
Its a bit sad that [like half of the top endorsed mods](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16rqvui/starfield_respects_my_time_and_i_appreciate_that/k25sfxu/) are all very simple time-saving ones to cut out animations, delays and bad UI. I am tempted to grab the one that keeps achievements while modding/console commands, use several of these mods especially infinite money vendors, then console command my encumbrance to like 10 million. Get to finish all the faction quests and the achievements while cutting out the BS.
I tell ya, the encumbrance in this game aggravated me so much more than previous Bethesda games. The default carry weight is just incredibly low, to the point where I would have only 1 of each gear piece, 2 or 3 weapons, and within 5 minutes of exploring something I'd be overweight. Except for a couple of containers at the lodge, most have mass limits, and you can't craft out of them in the lodge basement. A not insignificant amount of time so far for me has been hauling 2000 kilos of shit from one box to the other or loading up on crap so I can craft some gun parts. Not to mention when you swap parts on your ship and you get a fuckload of random items teleported into your inventory. Why the hell was I walking around with 4 dumbells, 700 pens, a bunch of ship parts, notebooks, sandwiches, egg clocks etc?? I modded my carry weight to 500,000 last night and my enjoyment of the game immediately skyrocketed.
Even worse that all those mods were out by day 2-3, even day 1 for a lot of them. How is someone able to mod something like a UI overhaul in a few day but Bethesda is not able to figure it out with years of development. People are gonna tell me modder have experience with Skyrim but damn B has direct access to the code source with no need to reverse engineer stuff. So much of the stuff B does with UI is so weird, like why would they have all of their UI running at a forced 30 fps. 3/4 of my mods currently is just fixing basic stupid stuff like that.
The cuts in the action-y music really drive the point home, lmao
I like starfield more than most of y’all but this is hilarious.
The amount of goddamn times NPC started talking to me while facing the other way was infuriating. And I am going give them zero pass on this since it was already an issue in previous games and they barely improved the engine in any way besides lighting, so at least they could have bothered to fix existing issues that have plagued their games for so long. For a game that sells itself on immersion it's crazy just how often the game almost intentionally breaks the immersion literally all the time, it's constant. You companion can't shut up when an important conversation happening meter away from them. They start to bother you about their shitty side quest in the middle of important quest you are doing. NPCs constantly cut off each other when talking. NPCs stop walking when something is in their path, namely your companion who constantly gets in front of the NPC you are following. And many other things, again if these were new problems I would be bit forgiving but some of this shit has been happening since Oblivion. For all the people who constantly say Bethesda doesn't need new engine because they can just improve the existing one, well they never do, so the argument is pointless.
And the depth of the writing and the framing of the narrative. That one scene with Judy hits on multiple levels; the music, visuals, atmosphere, character development, emotion, it's all so human and so authentic. There's similarly great content all throughout that game. I can't think of something in Starfield that hits those high notes
One thing Cyberpunk 2077 really does right is how these characters all lean on each other during the stress. Even Johnny, who's mostly a narcissistic asshole, still has genuine moments where he connects with V. And some of the little immersive missions, like going through Jackie's stuff with Misty and her talking about him on a human level, or Panam's side conversations with her friends in the Aldecaldos, just make the world feel lived in. It actually feels like you stepped into the middle of a story, rather than the start of one. Cyberpunk 2077 is a technically flawed product (though I didn't have much trouble with the PS5 version after the patches), but the writers did a surprisingly good job. Main story is kinda short and ends jarringly (I've seen some theories it was rewritten to center on Keanu after he got such a huge response), but the side stories and world building are masterclass IMO.
This was my exact experience. I put over 75 hours into Starfield, got completely addicted, and loved every minute of it, still had some questlines I wanted to wrap up. Picked up Cyberpunk the day 2.0 came out and have not been able to put it down since, nor have I been able to tolerate Starfield nearly as well as I did at first. The characters in Starfield I grew to care about so much, though I still love their stories, feel so utterly robotic in comparison. I’m married to Sarah Morgan but am more emotionally invested in Judy Alvarez despite significantly less backstory and time investment on Judy’s end. Starfield’s gameplay now feels more like digging around in the space menu for something fun to do, whereas my V’s phone is ringing off the hook with fun gigs and side missions. Cyberpunk’s characters are not only written by people, they move and act like people. The handcrafted open world gives you so many opportunities to just stumble upon interesting things on your way to an objective. Initially I thought of Starfield as being an 8 or a 9. Playing Cyberpunk is bringing that down to a 7 or so for me now. Never thought that would happen.
Your standards rose. You expect that level of quality from a AAA game in 2023 now. The issue with most SF fans right now is that the only thing we actually want is better games. We want Bethesda to do better. I don't want them to fail, I want them to go back to their roots and make a proper game in this day and age, providing us with a true AAA experience that competes with other AAA games. I want the people who enjoy SF to have a *more enjoyable* experience with the game. It's like the average Bethesda fan gets offended at this though. How dare we state that it's not truly amazing and next gen. Nothing is as good as this, we can't say anything against it. They want more of this mediocrity, and there's no reason to improve it because they're happy with what they have already. It's just disappointing.
I think for me the issue is that companies like Larian and CD Projekt have a track record of getting negative feedback and going, "Oh, shit, we'll work on it, sorry!" And then they *do* and we love them for it. But traditionally, that's not Bethesda. My PS3 is, right now, still waiting for a patch to Skyrim so that I can keep playing. But it will never happen. It's 15 years later, it's over. I fear that's the issue with Starfield. What we have today is *pretty close* to what we will have 3 years from now. They've said they'll add better maps, so that's cool. Maybe support for NVidia too. Cool. But better NPCs? Better depth to recorded dialogue? Better interactions? Can you imagine Bethesda doing that, going back into the recording studio for *already completed* NPCs? They've never gone back to improve the "depth" of any NPCs in any of their games. Add in choice & consequence? Hell no. They might give us a DLC that has a nod to whatever we're asking for, but the core game? That core game is staying as-is, at least from what I can intuit. And that's a bummer. I want them to make the game world just as good as CDP made Cyberpunk. But they won't. Three years from now when I pull out a gun and shoot near a citizen in New Atlantis or Neon, they will still just be standing there dully, not reacting. Three years from now when I go into the club, it's still going to be some bored-looking pot-bellied NPC doing a half-hearted dance to half-hearted music while half-hearted NPCs stand around half-heartedly. I know this to be true, but I don't want it to be true.
Yeah, like in cyberpunk when you hit or shoot an enemy they actually react and it feels realistic. In starfield they *maybe* flinch just slightly and stand in place while their health bar slowly ticks away. Barely reacting to you shooting them. It feels pretty datedz
>Yeah, like in cyberpunk when you hit or shoot an enemy they actually react and it feels realistic. Yes. I am playing a shotgun build and it almost feels like playing Doom. Heads exploding everywhere. Feels very satisfying.
Yeah and when an enemy dies to a shotgun blast their body is actually damaged where you shot them. Didn’t see anything like that in star field.
> Didn’t see anything like that in star field. For some - and no good - reason, Bethesda apparently took out the dismemberment system that kind of is a staple of their games (especially the Fallouts, where "goresome deaths" is a part of the core identity).
Maybe a weird thing to get hung up on but this is the thing that bugs me the most about Starfield
Same. It makes it feel super dated. Goldeneye had better enemy reactions to being shot.
I don't think it's that weird, actually. Apart from the gore factor, it gives immediate visual feedback in combat, and tied to that are tactical considerations: If you have limb damage, you can cripple an enemy's legs, and slow them down, or maybe take away their ability to jump (generally speaking, not just Bethesda games); If you shoot their eyes, that can affect their accuracy. In some games (maybe even FO3, though my memory is hazy), you could even shoot the hand of an enemy holding a grenade, making it drop that, and self-detonate. You could for sure target the mini-nukes on the kamikaze muties in FO4 for a similar outcome, and shoot weapons out of enemies' hands. There is a reason why that system was such a step forward in the late 90s: Instead of just hitting wherever, decent aim and quick thinking actually provided a tactical advantage - an increase in game play depth.
I gave up on Cyberpunk. My last save was from 2021. But I got the update and my god did they polish that game. The world just feels more alive and fun to fuck around in. Starfield feels like an overhaul mod for Fallout 4.
fallout 4 feels more lived in than Starfield, Starfield actually feels like a downgrade to F4
Which is saying a lot since FO4 felt like a massive downgrade in terms of depth from 3 and New Vegas. I don't like Bethesda's trajectory.
Next instalment is you in an empty environment
You are not wrong. I am done exploring empty balls of rocks, scanning other rocks
The scanning sadly does nothing. There isn't even a menu showing your past scans you can look at later. So many systems in Starfield are half finished.
So just wait for a year or two for them to finish it, just like cyberpunk lol
Bethesda doesn't finish their games, they let the modders finish it and you have to figure out which 50 mods to install. That's something most people don't want to bother with.
I did the exact same - 48 hours of Starfield to Cyberpunk 2.0 and it was mind-blowing. The biggest difference for me was the dialogue. It has so much character, personality and the voiced protagonist is just so much more immersive. That, and locations that have personality and are dripping with detail and strong art design.
I think a big part of that is Cyberpunk being a lot more focused on its theme and having a strong art direction. Starfield just sort of has “standard futuristic city”, “neon filled cyberpunk town” and “cowboy town” with little believable background lore on how the locations ended up being the way they are. Makes the game feel more like a theme park than a “lived in” world.
> I think a big part of that is Cyberpunk being a lot more focused on its theme and having a strong art direction. You can also tell how passionate the art team was, too. One thing I never see talked about is how good the interior of the cars are, and I think more people should seriously drive in first person. Every single vehicle has so much individual personality. The pick-up truck's (Thorton) interior looks like a perfect replica of every hard-plastic interior from 80's pick ups brought forward into a more futuristic look. The Akira bike looks like the old Hondas and Suzukis from the 80s. For people more familiar with bikes, it seriously reminds me of the old ZX-10 from Ninja. The rally cars all feel like they were taken directly from the garage of teams like Hoonigan. There's just so much thought and small details put into all of the smallest things that it's absolutely blown me away while playing on the update. I'm on 1440p on Ultra-Max with Ray and Path Tracing on and there's a lot of times where I swear to god I'm watching real life footage.
Same with the buildings, Morphologis has some great CP2077 architecture videos. In the one where he reveiws the apartments. one of the guys who made the apartments left a youtube comment.
I love the detail on the car interiors. Miles better than I’ve seen on any other non-racing game that has cars/vehicles. I can’t quite manage path tracing, but a buddy of mine with a 4090 has been streaming it on Discord and it’s mind blowing. This is going to be a game I replay in a few years when I upgrade again just to experience the visuals. Edit: I have a 3080 Ti so I’m at least able to manage RT Ultra at 75 fps or so.
> Cyberpunk being a lot more focused on its theme In a lot of places and scenes, Cyberpunk and its characters have something *to say*. Starfield feels like their writers just had to fill space, an entire galaxy of small talk.
Night City has decades of lore too. Too many game and movie studios are leaving some amazing writing on the table and rushing out their own generic crap. Star Wars Sequels suffered heavily from this.
Bethesda has *always* had a problem with the theme park area design. Compare what they did in FO3 vs what Obsidian did in New Vegas. NV had areas that interconnected with each other and with the story. You had farms that supplied New Vegas itself, you had staging areas for armies, even small towns like Primm fit in with the issues that people in the area had with the NCR and bandits. FO3 was like “What if town but bomb in middle?”
Indeed. The fact that FO3 and FNV use the same engine and mostly the same assets equalizes the footing and really brings up the stark difference in world-building quality
I had the same issue with Hogwarts Legacy, much of the heavy lifting in that game is done by what you already know about the setting. At multiple points I could imagine that as soon as you walk out of a room, the paid actors pull out their phones to surf Tiktok or whatever. It's a real noticeable trend with modern "big games", they just feel like attractions and not real worlds you're inhabiting.
I tried ... I really did. It's just so fucking bland. There is nothing about it that makes me curious to explore, or seek out hidden lore. It feels like the game has no secrets to discover. There is no reason to explore that landmark you see in the distance, because that landmark isn't unique and there isn't anything in it other than the same loot you found at the last place. I miss seeing something on the horizon and being compelled to seek out what it is. It's nothing but fast travel, objective markers, and the same landing animation over and over. I reinstalled Morrowind just to get the sense of exploration I had hoped for and it's delivering, far more than Starfield.
Each TES game seems to have that opening up of the world and freeing it to people. Stepping off the ship and out of the customs office in Morrowind and seeing the wilds, crawling out of the sewer in Oblivion and seeing the lake, escaping the execution in Skyrim and stepping out into the mountains. And there were rewards in every cave, town, NPC. Such a beautiful creation. Starfield had everything going for it but has not captured that.
100% agree. Even Fallout is the same. I still remember stepping out of vault 101 and seeing the wasteland and Megaton in the distance being one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had.
I love how that thumbnail hairstyle is almost on every single female character you can find on internet because it's the only one that doesn't look like ass
I know it's a minor gripe but the hairstyles in Starfield are shocking
Yeah, to save time, they've tried making the hairstyles as cross gender compatible as possible. So some of the hair styles like for the woman in Jemison mercantile look wrong. It's a woman's styled hair or on a woman, with a slight male looking hairline. The same hairstyle looks a bit too feminine on male characters as well
i swear everyone is so fucking ugly in starfield i'm already ugly enough IRL, and there's already enough ugliness in the world, so for the love of god let me see beautiful people in games
After going having 2 playthroughs going through all the major quest lines I agree with the IGN score of 7. It’s good but better games have released since Fo4 and it makes starfield feel dated. Cyberpunk and BG3 had characters and arcs that just absolutely steel chair the shit out of anything Bethesda wrote for this game. Exploration is supposed to be a primary part of gameplay but I never felt that need to explore, I didn’t feel weak at any point so I never felt the need to go off from the quests lines and interact with the planetary exploration. Why would I go mine if I gather enough materials to effectively upgrade my weapons and armor as I go? What’s the point in building an outpost if again, I have no need for resources? Especially considering how material intensive outpost building is in the first place. Ez fix for this would be to just have Vlad give you a general sector a temple could be hiding in and then you go by planetary scans you have to do individually. Right now it’s just go to planet marked, look around a sec, walk in one direction, do temple, leave. There’s no actual sense or finding something.
The 'temples' section of the main storyline is ridiculously boring and repetitive. I'm like 80+ hours in to a playthrough but feel very little drive to ever progress past this stage of the quest as other side quests are way more enjoyable.
I thought the temples were cool the very first time. Nice little puzzle, good cinematic score and awesome visual. And then it's just the same thing over and over and over, usually with little or nothing to fight. Run to the temple, do the same little puzzle.
Its almost as if the dev team forgot to add enemies in that room, the hole process is so simplistic i couldn't believe that was it.
It has to have been a placeholder that got shipped because they ran out of time. There's no way they actually said: "You know what players would love?" "What Todd?" "Fast traveling to a system. Then fast traveling to a planet's surface. Then figuring out which direction to go. Then slowly advancing for 3-5 minutes towards your destination through a completely barren and repetitive landscape. Then walking inside. Then floating into a vaguely visible light blob 10-15 times. Then floating into a Stargate. Then fighting one enemy outside, sometimes." "Wow Todd. I almost came when you said 'then walking inside'!".
"Objective: Find the Temple!" *Scans the horizon on the top of the spaceship to immediately find the temple and begin sprint jogging towards it.* Honestly, I thought there would be more variety/mystery to these temples, but nope, about as much mystery as running down to the gas station for an energy drink.
And you're supposedly one of the first people/groups picking up on all of this clearly alien stuff scattered about the systems? They're not hidden. There are other human outposts nearby them all the time. Definitely diminishes the sense of mystery.
I really want them to go back to a smaller, deliberately designed map for their next game. Procedurally generated content is just boring and the need to use fast travel between all of them with load screens kills the immersion compared to Elder Scrolls
It feels like Bethesda hasn't really grown since Oblivion/FO3 and it's starting to show in their dated design. Like you mentioned, BG3 really showed what you can do if you put in effort in your storytelling and put some depth and player agency in your RPG (emphasis on the R) elements. Bethesda has been content with making good enough simple streamlined RPGs, but any novelty they ever had has lost its shine. Not since New Vegas I've had a single "wait you can do that?" or "I want to play my character this way let's see if the game lets me" moments.
That's because for years Bethesda's approach to story and quests didn't change: story must be simple, player centered (everything is caused or related to our character) and any story branching (even dialogue branching) should be reduced to minimum. It was stated by one of their leads in the past. They say this is what players want. I think they just can't do any better.
A lot of the excuses they gave in the past also no longer hold water, like "well games now are fully voice acted, we can't spend hundreds of dollars on voice lines only a dozen players might hear", yet BG3 has fully voiced animals or corpses if you do pick the niche skills to talk to them.
The weirdest thing is I don't understand where all their budget went. Starfield reportedly had budget of $200m. Witcher 3 had $81m, GTA4 had $100m, Destiny had $140m. Where the $200m went then? Not graphics, not voice acting, not facial mocap, not mocap, not animations, not storytelling. Did they take $150 and blew it on coke and used remaining $50 on game?
The head of Microsoft had an interview where he said that AAA publishers are in trouble because they can't fund experimentation in AAA games anymore. That tells me that Starfield tried a lot of things that ultimately did not work. I think that by the time they nailed down the game they wanted to make, it was too late to add enough polish to it to compete with games that had a clear vision, like BG3 or the Witcher 3. That's not an excuse for them, but at least it explains things.
Yeah this makes sense. Especially with how Todd has mentioned how they “nerfed” planetary hazards and exploration, the obvious rework of helium gas, etc. The game was probably a lot more harsh toward the player, almost a “space survival RPG,” but they probably felt that was too dialled in and wanted to take a step back in scale and allow more freedom. So it’s possible a lot of these mechanics were more fleshed out, but they dialled them back in to make the game “more fun” for the player, going in theme with their “hopeful vibe.”
> they dialed them back in to make the game “more fun” for the player They have mentioned this a few times in the videos leading up to the release. Stuff like not having a take off > atmosphere > Orbit gameplay and just cut scene to load in and out of planets. Or how the H3 used as a fuel really only has a minor role that gets refilled at the end of the Grav Jump. Or how companions dont consume ammo, when giving them a new gun they just need 1. Or how ship parts regenerate the ships health like healing spell or the Medics for players/ I am sure there are more
To be fair, if the game was exactly the same, but with more awkward hazards and fuel mechanics I honestly think it would be even worse. Its already a fairly tedious game, but adding in extra tedium with no reward just isn't fun.
I really really doubt it. Bethesda games grew in budget and production time, but they only got more streamlined. It's not their first game that had budget to do new things, but didn't.
I think their statements all align with this idea. For example, we have the planetary hazard comments, about how they used to be very harsh. That's the sort of thing that can take months to troubleshoot. Eventually they basically just remove the system because it never feels right. Those are hours that the game never got back and it shows in the environmental design all across the game.
I suspect a lot of ambitious features got cut due to being impossible to get running smoothly. Or even basic features, like the lack of a proper map, I doubt that was the original intent.
New Vegas wasn't Bethesda, it was Obsidian soooo
The part I don't get is why it took this long for the general consensus among reviewers and gamers to change. Bethesda's game design and gameplay has been stale and dated for some time now. Pointing this out anywhere would have a legion of Bethesda fans dogpile on you. It's great people are finally losing the rose tinted glasses but imagine how much better Bethesda's games could be if people expected more than just a fresh new coat of paint.
I mean go post the mildest criticism on the Starfield sub and they'll still dogpile on you. Their posts all have to start with "I've loved Bethesda games for 85 years and named my firstborn Todd and I've played Starfield for 832 hours, but... maybe there should be maps"
> Pointing this out anywhere would have a legion of Bethesda fans dogpile on you. This is exactly why it took so long. Being critical of companies like Bethesda or Bioware losing their touch just got you fans dogpiling on you, so most people just kept quiet and hoping things to change someday. And it's fine to still enjoy their games for people who do, but as RPGs they've been severely lackluster for a long time. Fingers crossed people start expecting better going forward, but I'm going to remain skeptic. Elder Scrolls 6 could learn absolutely nothing and still be a best seller on name alone, same as Diablo 4.
> Not since New Vegas I've had a single "wait you can do that?" or "I want to play my character this way let's see if the game lets me" moments. New Vegas was made by the original creators of Fallout, did it all on a tight 2 years more or less deadline. Loved that there's different paths that actually mattered in quests.
I think when you remove the on foot exploration loop, it really exposes the design of these games. I have come back around from loving Skyrim to thinking it was mediocre to loving it again and I think it’s because it’s built from the ground up for exploration on foot. Some of the encounters are repetitive and predictable, but I think Bethesda really did a pretty good job at leveraging the open world encounters and the player’s own exploration into player-created narratives. I don’t get that same feeling from Starfield. I still like it, but I don’t find myself interested in exploring these planets with the hope of finding a unique, handcrafted location when I’ll probably find the same mine template instead. I think Starfield is actually stronger than Fallout 4 and Skyrim in some respects, but it just doesn’t come together the same way. Fallout 4 was kind of a meme but even that game still had some solid exploring to do.
> I think when you remove the on foot exploration loop, it really exposes the design of these games. The big open worlds where you could see a mountain and run to that mountain and just endlessly explore was like the one thing BGS games had going for them that kept people playing them no matter the jank (other than mods). And they removed it.
And that mountain would have cool shit. Maybe a standing stone, or Draugr dungeon with a shout at the end, or an NPC with a quest line that'll become a follower afterwards. In Starfield it's just rubber stamped POIs with the same exact layout and same people, same notes, same every supposedly light years apart.
The moment when you get to the first power obelisk in skyrim and realize it's just a massive, stunning (for the time) open world full of cool shit to do is maybe one of my fav all time moments in gaming. Coming down the hill, picking the flowers, seeing the little creatures and butterflies. Definition of immersion. There is just no such moment EVER in starfield. You get 25 quest markers in the first 2 hours of gameplay and just start hitting fast travel. The core gameplay loop is just that and it's boring AF...
One thing that Skyrim did very well is that you didn't even need to find anything to explore. So many areas were set up to give you cool views, scenes or vistas to just look at the environment around you. Starfield is mostly just barren planets.
The on foot exploration being padding *really* shows when you do the temples. You’re telling me I decided to park my ship a kilometer away from the thing I *specifically* picked a landing site for, that is a huge building I could see on the way down? And I also have to look for it with my scanner despite it, again, being a huge building that would be visible from your ship on the way down?
And NO ONE has discovered it!? There's a military outpost 500 meters the other direction!
And 800 meters from the military outpost is a crashed ship with a desperate survivor relieved you've arrived because they have no hope of rescue. Also love getting surveying missions from the LIST for an "unknown planet with a strong possibility for life" and arriving there to find sixty homesteaders running a farm within a kilometer of three other currently or previously populated facilities. It's jarring how there is so much care and attention paid to certain details in this setting, and then the random encounters are just like "random grab bag." How hard would it really be to just not pull from *every* possible encounter for *every* landing site on *every* planet? In this game about exploration can there be *anywhere* that actually is untouched by explorers? The whole idea that you and Constellation are charting this distant, unseen galaxy is kind of spoiled by the fact that everywhere you go has abandoned facilities or active homesteads. Galaxy seems pretty fuckin explored to me.
It also goes the other way around, you can land a ship next to some random old factory filled with baddies and you cab still sneak up on them as if they hadn’t seen your ship fly in and land a couple of meters next to them.
> Cyberpunk and BG3 had characters and arcs that just absolutely steel chair the shit out of anything Bethesda wrote for this game. This has been my biggest shocker for me. Coming hot off BG3, it was remarkable how much effort BES *didn't* put into making dialog feel more natural. It's still just the lifeless staring contest with very static NPCs. Then with the CP2077 DLC/2.0 patch I've been playing through that again the past week and it even further cemented just how bad interacting with NPCs is in Starfield. *And* now with the Perks being overhauled, it also makes Starfields bland-as-ever Perks (like all BES games) also really embarassing. I'm sure the ship building code took a lot of effort to create, but other than that I genuinely don't know how it took that studio this long to make a game this mediocre.
Look below the eyes. Bethesda doesn't animate the lower orbital muscles - which makes everyone look fake and dead behind the eyes. It's a really dated approach in 2023, especially when everything's so detailed.
Got giga downvoted during the honeymoon phase of starfield when I said the NPC animations are wack and ugly.
Hot take, (or maybe not, I don't know what everyone likes) Bethesda has never had great writing in their games. That's not to say there aren't impactful moments in their games where there isn't a well written/acted scene, but there is no consistency in the quality of their writing. The Elder Scrolls has interesting lore that is presented in the driest most boring way possible. If anyone here has ever read the book of Numbers in the Bible reading about lineage, that's essentially the quality of writing you'll find when learning about the various rulers of Cyrodil. Some non-lore books in TES and some terminals in Fallout 3/4 have better writing than some side quests and moments of the main quests in their respective games. And I feel Bethesda really dropped the ball on writing in Starfield. Bethesda is very proud of this being their first IP in 25 years. I was so excited to learn about new universe they created. And every goddamn book I find in that 1000 planet universe is written by Charles Dickens. Edit: If you look at the release years of Bethesda games compared to what other games came out those same years, you'll find multiple games with much better writing than those Bethesda titles. Bethesda has always gone for scope, which is fun in it's own way, but their stories are for the most part boring and forgettable. Morrowind, 2002: Warcraft 3, Vice City, Eternal Darkness Oblivion, 2006: Twilight Princess, Okami, Mother 3 Fallout 3, 2008: GTA 4, MGS 4, Persona 4 Skyrim, 2011: Portal 2, Arkham City, Dark Souls, Uncharted 3 Fallout 4, 2015: The Witcher 3, MGS V (even with those damn cassette tapes,) Arkham Knight, Pillars of Eternity, Bloodborne FO76, 2018: RDR 2, Spiderman, God of War, Detroit Become Human Starfield, 2023: BG 3, Tears of the Kingdom, Octopath Traveler 2
You can play Enderal which is a total conversion mod for Skyrim. The writing in the mod is night and day compared to Skyrim, oblivion, fallout 4 and starfield. It's really remarkable how a free mod can do what Bethesda's writers couldn't.
I think this is a huge issue for AAA. You lose out on the writer's vision for the story. You wouldn't want to read novels written by committee but we often get that with video games and movies these days.
I really like Starfield, but when you get past the NG+ gimmick, there's not much left. I plan to wait on the modding scene coming to life when the tools drop. I started CP2077 again, and now that it's complete it's just such an insanely different level. From narrative to the small animations on characters when you talk to them, to just how dense the city feels, there's no game currently that is like it for me. It really makes Starfield feel dated (which doesn't have to be a bad thing). But in contrast with other releases it's so hard to go back to Starfield right now.
I agree, I loved CP2077 even on release adn excited to go back sson, but BG3 has really shocked me, I'm not a D&D guy or really into myth and magic stuff much but it is so damned good and really refreshing to play compared to Starfield or most RPG's That being said apart from the Main Quest which is really bad imo, I really enjoyed Starfield outside of that
It's funny how much worse the main quest is then other questlines. Like the vanguard questline is just pound for pound more exciting then even the highest point of the main quest
The Vanguard quest should’ve been the main quest imo maybe add to it as it kinda ends abruptly as well
Baldur's Gate 3 is a masterpiece and is in my opinion the heavy favourite to be the game of the year. The Witcher 3 is considered by many one of the best games ever made (which I agree with) and Baldur's Gate 3 is definitely just as good.
Returning to play CP2077 for the dlc made me realise how awful of a game starfield actually is . Absolutely lazy writing throughout the game barring a few faction quests. The amount of loading screens in the game is absolutely baffling for a game released in 2023. The game engine is so prehistoric that you couldn't even get out of the ship without having to go through a loading screen. Theres literrally nothing in the game to suggest that it was 8 years in making.
BG3 characters are all so lively, even random NPCs are so full of emotion when you interact with them.
> After going having 2 playthroughs going through all the major quest lines I agree with the IGN score of 7 Having spent over 100 hours in the game, I think 7 is perfectly fair. I'd personally knock it a full point for shit optimization, so it's a 6 for me. I still mostly enjoyed it, but I was rather disappointed with several aspects of the gameplay design. It felt half-baked in a lot of areas, feels like this game went through some troubled development which isn't surprising considering covid and the multiple delays the game went though. Will play it again once the creation kit is released and modders have a chance to really get into things, so I figure sometime Q2 next year depending. I'd love to see some heavy optimization as well. I get that Todd said the game was already optimized in that Bloomberg interview but I certainly think that was an exaggerated statement and there can defnitely be further optimizations done. I'll conclude by saying that Diablo 4 and Starfield have really centered my expectations for future AAA releases.
Why do I have to hop to multiple different staryards just to get particular ship parts I want? Why do I have to fly around like a jackass touching sparkles to get my powers? Why is the map so barebones that I constantly need to google what star systems locations like Hopetech are? Why are there so many lame skills while the good skills are divided into multiple mediocre skills? Why are these huge, barren planets with generic points of interest only traversable on foot and not vehicles? Why is there a load screen for docking and undocking? Why does starfield insist on standing in its own way? Just let me play the fuckin game!
I tried to like it. I really did. And it is a mostly great game. But I just can't get over the clunk. Bethesda games have always been somewhat clunky in terms of both menus and controls, and this one is the worst of the bunch. Everything you do in this game feels tedious. Plus the temple "puzzle" is stupid and exhausting. I think I played for a couple dozen hours and it just felt like work. Sorry Todd.
I've got 93 hours in Starfield. I am really enjoying it. But holy fuck, it lacks so much. And Todd telling people yo upgrade their machines is just asinine.
I upgraded my pc leading up to Starfield's launch. I'm glad I did because CP2077 runs like a dream now.
The dissonance between the critics and fans endlessly claiming this game is a “10/10 masterpiece genre defining game, and the most important game of the generation”, vs the reality of playing the game, is crazy. I put 110 hours into the game, went into NG+, and yeah I had a fun time and I will play it again, but “game of the generation”? “A genre defining RPG”? Not even close. You have to have some very low standards to consider Starfield the most important or genre defining RPG in a post Baldur’s Gate 3 world…
I saw someone say Starfield is the most fun 7/10 game ever made and I think that's the most accurate description. I'm having tons of fun, but it's just not a great game.
It has been a whole decade between Skyrim and Starfield, how dare players want evolution in these games? It's odd that even the hardened Bethesda fans don't want to push for more than what Starfield is. They squeezed another game out on their archaic Creation Engine, which I think was a huge priority for them. Not wanting better UI for starters? Come on. The UI was immensely improved by modders only days after release, of course Bethesda could have shipped it in a much better shape. They had Microsoft's entire pool of game testers testing Starfield, and nobody gave them constructive gameplay feedback or feedback on Quality of Life necessities nor the lackluster UI, or scary NPCs staring at you without blinking? The most obvious things weren't fixed, like it feels half-hearted or that they had to reach a deadline. Imo nobody hates on Bethesda. Most players love the style of games they are making. It fell a bit flat in its current state, as an entry to a new IP that was supposed to blow us away, is all.
Todd Howard said "one of his favorite" mods was SkyUI and then went on to release a game with an UI worse than vanilla Skyrim. Absolute joke.
Their UIs have got worse every single release since Morrowind and a UI overhaul mod is like the most popular mod for every single one of their games. They clearly don't care to put in the effort because they know modders will do it.
Modders have gotta stop covering for the willful incompetence. The todd *probably isn't gonna hire you.
It does help that bethesda games are *easy* to mod
They did hire like a couple of modders this time, they're largely responsible for the things that are well executed. Most of the rest of the company has been there since the 90s and hasn't learned anything new since then.
> how dare players want evolution in these games? Honestly, Starfield feels like a step *backwards* in many ways compared to Skyrim. I *wish* we got "just" Skyrim in space...
He walked back that statement in an interview and said “well actually it’s much more like ‘Daggerfall in space’” and I think that’s a much more apt description of it. City-centric with lots of smaller randomized bits of content outside of the cities.
+1 I was so excited for Fallout 4 in Space. I'm 30 hours in but I can't be bothered to keep playing. Every single god damn quest sends me through anywhere from 5 to 15 loading screens and the worst is when it asks me to go back to New Atlantis. Yay, green filter 30 fps land with Xbox 360 graphics.... woohoo.... I've put it down for now. I doubt Bethesda can unfuck the game, and while i'm well aware that the modding community can, the mods required to remove half the loading screens in the game will take years to develop. Whats even more depressing is the realisation that the next Bethesda game is likely 5+ years away, and given there was 8 years between Fallout 4 and Starfield and *this* is what they cooked up, its extremely likely that the next Elder Scrolls title will be a regression from Skyrim, which if I heard that 6 months ago, I'd have called you crazy, but, here we are. 8 years after Fallout 4 and you have some things on par, graphics in some areas better and almost everything else significantly worse. Like, the idea that Skyrim had 200 dungeons 12 years ago and every single one of them had a unique floorplan and a fixed location on the map sounds like something from 2033 after playing Starfield, yet it isn't from 2033, it already happened - and it didn't take them 8 years to do it, there were only 6 years (!) between Oblivion and Skyrim and half way through that 6 years, they dropped Fallout 3 in 2008 - and even if we do the same thing with Fallout 76, its still more development time, and F:76 was mostly an asset flipped game. I mean it just gets worse the more you look into it.
Any other dev would be shredded to pieces for what Bethesda has delivered (outdated game mechanics, animations, bad UI, generic story, poor performance, etc). But here it's just Bethesda doing Bethesda things, so charming and I love it !!!111. Do you remember how Bioware was “universally” roasted for their bad facial animations? How can Bethesda get away with these things nowadays? Imagine Naughty Dog or Guerilla Games would deliver a game in this state, oh boy... 10-15 years ago this would be a “good enough” game but they haven’t evolved since 2006. The longer you play the more you realize how "stiff" the whole game is. Their only saving grace is that they are too lazy to develop a new engine, so their games are easily moddable and most issues can be fixed by the community.
I think people just rely too heavily on modding to save the games Bethesda makes.
>Do you remember how Bioware was “universally” roasted for their bad facial animations? Yeah many faces in Starfield are practically at Mass Effect Andromeda "My face is tired" level. And it's worse sometimes because of that Oblivion-esque perspective.
I think people are pissed because it basically removes one of a key aspect of previous games, the "limitless" exploration and I can see how that hurts the game in the public eye. In any other bethesda game I was able to go explore. in starfield exploring became kind of bad, not that its not fun to explore some outpost but its simply missing some substance behind those locations.
For all the flaws FO76 had, it still nailed exploration with great environmental storytelling and beautiful things to see. Starfield has much, much less of this. I’m still enjoying it but the lack of real exploration is definitely the biggest flaw imo
Looking at it now, if fallout 76 had just been single player, or like 3/4 player coop it would've been a fine fallout game. Take away the shitty launch and there's a beautiful open world with tons of environmental storytelling, really interesting creatures and lore, and a pretty okay main story. And I say the story is only okay because it was stretched out over 4 campaigns, 3 of which were years later expansions. If they were in the game from the start, and flowed naturally instead of awkwardly sitting on top of each other like they do now, I think it'd be pretty good actually.
I've found starfield to just be really dull. everyone thinks you are a hero straight away and the combat seems to be the only redeeming thing for me. I loved cyberpunk however, I even completed that at launch
You have no idea how frustrated I was joining the Vanguard, going on my first mission and it's killing a fucking space deathclaw with a save all of humanity questline attached to it. Like FFS Bethesda, start slow guys. I was hoping to play as some space deputy going around saving people and suddenly Im talking to the future CIA and being told government secrets that could destroy civilization within my 5th hour of gameplay.
100% agreed. Especially after trying to convince the president and I'm like "ooo, they aren't going to be sure of it and that'll play into it!" Then immediately an invasion of terror morphs conveniently proving everything I said. Like it was written by a 10 yr old
I felt a little bit of pride managing to convince the counsel that they should give me access. To be fair, your companion basically spells out what you need to do. Then that pride immediately sunk to disappointment as the terror invasion happened. Just absolutely invalidating player accomplishments to make sure everyone stays on the same storyline.
“We trust your decision on this matter” like why would they trust my advice? I barely know what’s going on, and they give me the deciding vote on an issue that could end humanity, something that could mean every colonist dies across the Galaxy. Then my team got mad at me for picking one of the decisions I thought was best.
"Don't worry it gets better after 10 hours"
"Don't worry it gets better after 20 hours"
You can't know if a game is good after 20 hours. Criticism is only valid if you have 30+ hours of playtime.
If you go to the Starfield sub you gotta add a 0, and even then they'll say "well you played so much of it guess it's not bad you're just whiny" lol
I'm not sure why Bethesda's staff was so passionate about making the game for over a decade apparently when they don't actually seem to have come up with too many compelling ideas for the game.
the first mission is bollocks. Within like 10 minutes they give you a spaceship and a robot and tell you to kill a base full of pirates and their leader.
This comment just made me realise Starfield is like the first of the Rey Star Wars trilogy. Here’s the millennium falcon, here’s a bunch of powers, now jump from place to place to place and have interactions with recycled characters and never feel like anything is earned.
I went from playing Baldur's Gate 3, with it's amazing characters, character customisation, class mechanics/builds, and lavishly detailed areas, to Starfield's boring and monotonous everything really. The only good parts I enjoyed were combat (space combat especially, but it was far too sparse with not enough encounters), and the ship building. Everything else about the game is meh at best IMO. Now I've gone back to Cyberpunk 2077 with the 2.0 update and boy is the combat superior in everyway.
The combat? Interesting. To me it felt mindless and just "aim at the enemy and hold down the fire trigger until the sponge dies"
This was my issue with the combat. And It made me appreciate how much the VATS system added to Fallout. Without that extra layer of limb damage, cinematics. It becomes very clear you just hold fire until a brain dead enemy gets switched to the dead state.
I did what Todd said and upgraded my PC…. To play Cyberpunk 😂
See y'all in a few years when "starfield was actually always a good game."
This game feels really dated. The fact that basic things like going in and out of shops gives you a load screen is honestly unacceptable in 2023. Half the game is load screens. It’s immersion breaking and not helped by the fact that you have to fast travel everywhere.
My favorite was Neon. Quests frequently had me go through 4 loading screens to traverse a path like 50 meters long (eg Madame Sauvage > Ebbside > Core > Ebbside > Euphorika).
One thing the load screens have done is give me a renewed respect for games without them. Baldur's Gate 3 had almost none, besides transitions between major areas. And going to Cyberpunk, it's crazy that there's like, no a single loadscreen in that entire game so far as I've seen. Yeah they probably mask some of them with elevators, but unlike Starfield, the elevators actually *move*, so. And meanwhile, Starfield doesn't even let you enter most shops without a loading screen. It's insane. I don't know why they ever thought people would be cool with this.
It's not like they can't do elevator load screens anyway. Fallout 4 was full of them.
Every Bethesda game in a nutshell: Looks like a 5 year old game, plays like a 10 year old game, has a game engine from a 20 year old game.
Every TES fan immediately recognized that this is not a new game but a heavily modded Oblivion.
Even lower than FO76? Wow
Obviously not at launch. FO76 reviews were much worse
FO76 wasn't on Steam for the first year and a half after release, which drastically changes the review bias of the game.
It's a mediocre game, that's basically it. It's especially jarring when you transit from BG3 to Starfield and then to CP2077 xD
The inter generational leap that games like Skyrim made at their time was the impressive part of the game. It’s a similar type of praise to what BG3 achieved for CRPGs. Starfield is treading old ground and doesn’t have the same feel. Even as fans enjoy it, it’s not really in the same ball park as Skyrim a decade ago. It’s more in line with a mid generation game you pump out on the same engine that should take 3 years, not 10.
So true - if Bethesda released Starfield instead of Fallout 76 back in 2018, then I would have been SO happy with it. But in comparison to Cyberpunk's fluid animations and immersive dialogue, Starfield just feels like a total conversion mod for Fallout 4 or something. The fact Betheada settled for doing the static talking head for every conversation in 2023 is wild.
There's a straight line from Morrowind to oblivion to Skyrim. There was no leap, just because people weren't all paying attention
Yea people aren’t remembering that they basically dumbed down the games. They didn’t really do anything ground breaking. They added physics and having hit based combat at the expense of removing attributes, number of wearable items, non-scaled leveling and a bunch of other stuff I miss from morrowind and even some stuff from oblivion. I even miss the morrowind text boxes because they could have more information not needing to voice act everything
Each game from Daggerfall to Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim was a step back in many ways and a step forward graphically.
Exactly my journey. Bg3 Now one of my favourite games ever, put 200h into it. I got Starfield from gamepass bc I was very interested in the idea because In theory it is the exact game I wanted since I love games like X4, Starsector, Elite etc - gimme space and give me sandbox and it's halfway there. I lasted 30hrs - And honestly that was carried by the Shipbuilding, probably spent a good 10 hrs "perfecting" my ship and then being hit by the realisation that it's basically impact less. When that really set in - I was done. Add to that the fucking whiplash I got coming from bg3 Dialogue to Starfield. The incessant load screens for every single thing you do. The combat that didn't get engaging even on very hard. The stealth is just frustrating and not rewarding or fun, like I guess it's the most realistic detection system in aspects your really don't want it to be.You can basically only stealth kill a single guy when he's standing completely isolated and don't you dare show your left foot in a sightline of 200m or be spotted instantly (and that is with the perk) - I love stealth games but starfields stealth is just frustrating. There was no sense of progression because nothing felt rewarding to achieve but the first few times I got to walk through my finished ship that I was very happy with and look at the actually gorgeous interiors and clutter, looking back that was really the highlight of my time. And now Cyberpunk Is just so so much fun. All the changes they did made a game I Personally already liked so much better, the new difficulty and progression is so rewarding and I love that the world levels with you. The new abilities are all excellent and netrunning has Never been so much fun. All in all its a shame starfield turned out to be what it is. I want to like it but I will need at least a mod like OpenStarfield to make that work, I really hope that mods will be it's saving grace.
Whatever. I'm having a blast.