This entire thread is hilarious. I’ve been paying for therapy like a sucker, I didn’t know you could get infinite amounts of free psychoanalysis just by suggesting that Starfield is somewhat underwhelming.
I see. So how does that make you feel?
The amount of gaslighting I’ve seen gamers do to themselves over this game has been wild. “Is it me? Maybe I’m the problem. Maybe I just don’t like games anymore?”
They’d rather do that than admit that a Bethesda game kinda sucks. And if you say it’s not good, people will come after you. The super Bethesda defenders keep claiming the game is getting review bombed, but from what I’ve seen it’s the other way around. If you say something negative about it, people will jump on your case. I’ve seen so many streamers and YouTubers try and cover their asses when trying to speak critically about this game to keep the Todd brigade from forming a mob in their comment sections.
It’s been such a wild game release.
Starfield fans are vicious. I got called mentally ill, incel, shit like that because I call out their loading screen simulator.
‘loading screen simulator’ lol I love this, imma use it
Hmmm. I think this relates to your relationship with your father…
Yeah, it’s pretty underhwelming. There’s a lot of people who claim Starfield is a “great Bethesda game” but “people hyped it up too much.” In my opinion, it’s a terrible Bethesda game. The best thing those games do right is you can set off in a direction and along the way, find a world full of little things. Landmarks, unique little stories, side quests, and even just interesting items to grab. Starfield dropped all of this in favor of incredibly generic proc gen planets that have the same couple of outposts you’ll see on every planet. Like THE SAME. The interiors are THE SAME. Every safe, dead body, message log is THE SAME.
It lacks the one thing that brought me back to Bethesda games despite all their flaws.
Lost interest in a few hours I was sad.
Great potential, horrible interface, wonky mechanicsSame. The interface looks kinda cool, but the UX is awful, and the story is boring. The biggest reason it doesn’t capture you IMO is you just jump around from place to place instantaneously right from the start and there’s no obvious reason to just go exploring somewhere. In Skyrim you’re literally on foot and the world slowly expands around you and you become interested in it.
In Skyrim you’re literally on foot and the world slowly expands around you and you become interested in it.
Yeah, and exploration wisey I prefer Oblivion even more. Skyrim feels smaller and less varied, and horses and other fast-travel options are cheaper and easier available.
I got to hear a talk from a level designer who worked on Skyrim at Bethesda who had since left the company, and we needled them with some questions about Starfield and it was interesting at the time but even more interesting in the hindsight of now playing the game.
We kind of intuited through some of their answers that it sounded like they felt that with Skyrim, individual level designers and programmers and people had way more freedom to put stuff into the game; many of the more memorable side quests and interactions were never remotely planned to be in there but were just threwn together by a couple people who stayed overnight recording voices and programming in these quests and interactions and stuff, and it sounded like they did not think that was was the case with Starfield and it was a much more rigid and controlled dev environment, which would explain why so much of the stuff feels like it’s randomly generated stuff you’ve already seen instead of coming across these weird handcrafted things.
They also talked a lot about open world level design in general and talked about how good open world level design is often inspired by Disney world, where they pay super close attention to sightlines where ever you are to make sure there’s always (ideally multiple) interesting things to see and explore. You shouldn’t need a waypoint or hud marker ideally, you should just walk out of one thing, look around and go “hey that looks neat let me go see what’s over there”, discover something magical, walk out and repeat. That kind of feeling made sense and resonated with me at the time and made me think of the new Zelda games and some of the better open world games I’ve played, but now in the context of Starfield, it feels like the loading screens between planets pretty fundamentally broke that cycle, and disrupted that feeling of exploration that Skyrim gave you.
I was at a talk by Bruce Nesmith for a game development club I was in in college shortly after FO4 released (and also shortly after they filed the trademark for Starfield but before we knew anything).
One thing I remember well is him saying how they messed up with the FO4 dialogue options. Every one was “yes, no (for now), sarcastic yes, and more information.” I had a reasonable amount of faith at least that would be fixed in Starfield. It isn’t, though it’s like they thought it being presented on a wheel was the part people were upset with, not the complete lack of choice. In Starfield the choices are identical but they’re now presented in the classic box at the bottom of the screen.
The “Disney effect” is exactly what’s missing from Starfield that makes it so boring. Because of the format of the planets and star systems, you can’t just see something to go to. Discovery is done through a menu, which is incredibly boring.
And on top of that, when you do land on a planet, there’s literally nothing to do and see. It feels like there are no more than 10 unique buildings that get swapped in and out… once you’ve seen them, there’s nothing left to discover.
It would have been infinitely better had it been 1 star system with like 4 planets and 20 moons. Each one with multiple locations on the surface. Instead of this thousands of planets but basically all randomly generated none of them really interesting.
They kept saying that’s realistic because most plants are boring but it’s a RPG not a SIM so that logic doesn’t track.
The best space game is still The Outer Wilds and that game has only about 5 planets with the largest one only been about half a mile across. Scale isn’t everything.
Same. After visiting 3 random planets and entering the exact same bases with the exact same enemies… Except they were like random level from 3-48. Not that it weirdly mattered much. Already felt godlike.
AAA gets worse every year, and I’m gamer for over 4 decades… I was so glad I didn’t bought the crapfest
Can we organize and create an AAA game on Lemmy that is worth playing?
I would start with one A first
I’ll make the logo
I actually am more hyped/enthusiastic about simple indie-games nowadays. Even if they often fail at simple manpower or financial issues. The rare exceptions where AAA still delivers is countable with one hand. I even have to think hard to name 5 from the last 10yrs that kinda lived up to the hype.
A joint-effort AAA by us gamers? Nah. Who pays the AAA in AAA? 😁 Times are over where a game like pacman could be done by the intern on a free evening. Including GFX and SFX…
Maybe don’t just go to random bases? Follow a quest and you will encounter incredible environments/dungeons.
Those random bases are for end-game stuff when you have literally nothing else to do but you still want to play your save file.
I did in the beginning. Then got bored by the loading-screens. Besides it only worked at all with a mod that enabled file-caching. Otherwise I had horribly unsynched audio, ending with completely stopping sound. It was a joke. And no, it wasn’t my system, which is decently beefy to play every other AAA-title on FHD@maximum/ultra.
I excepted nothing, and so I wasn’t overly dissapointed (especially coz I didn’t buy it). I’ll do the wise thing and just wait 1-2 years. The bugs are maybe mostly squished out by then and the community will have made it a loooot better.
I really wanted to like it btw, it’s not that I was just glad to jump on the hype- or hate-train. I don’t care for those. I just played enough games to see the many many many flaws. I didn’t even care how dated the graphics were :)
Also btw, the argument is pretty weird considering it’s an OPEN-WORLD game. In Skyrim&Co I also often wandered the world for many many hours before even starting any quests.
As an old-schooler, I think this is all funny. A lot of the Daggerfall fans were disappointed in Morrowind because it moved away from procedurally generated “everything else”. The world felt so tiny.
Starfield adds some procedural outside of its core paths to give us that unlimited replayability, and people just complain about it.
I’ve played TES games since Daggerfall came out. That was my first giant open world game, and despite all of the horrible game breaking bugs I played it so much I risked my college degree.
Based on all of the descriptions and the fact that I’m right now only playing games that run well on the steam deck, I’m skipping this one for now. I couldn’t imagine the thousands of hours I’ve spent playing and replaying TES and Fallout games. But every release gets more dumbed down, it seems.
Honestly, the only thing keeping me from even checking it out is that it sounds boring. I’m still totally overplaying BG3, I love playing Stray, and Depth is great when I have limited time or attention. If everyone was raving about it, I might check it out, but as it is, I can wait.
I’m in the same historical boat as you. Arena was one of my first games on my 486. Here’s my take.
Starfield is Skyrim in Space with Daggerfall’s procedural generation. It may not be the perfect game (or for some people, even a good game), but it is the close-to-ideal Elder Scrolls experience in space.
Honestly, the only thing keeping me from even checking it out is that it sounds boring
I tried a Daggerfall playthrough where I went town to town looking for loot and doing nothing else. It got boring because the towns all started to look alike. So I stopped and just played it how it was meant to be played.
There’s no “boring” take if you ignore the procedural filler content and outpost system (which Bored me in my last FO4 playthrough) and focus on the storyline and main areas. The other stuff is all there for those of us who enjoy mission-fun. I LIKE pirating ships again and again, but maybe you don’t. Literally the boring complaints come from the fact that they gave us Daggerfall-level places to explore, with Daggerfall-level repetition.
That’s a great description! Thanks!
This is the first one that’s made me want to check out the game. I actually weirdly enjoyed the randomly generated dungeons that were basically all the same, probably because I had never played such a completely open world game before. At least some of it had to be the novelty compared to games like Ultima or the D&D games out at the time.
I’ve always played a lot of the RP part in my head - like in Morrowind I’d usually play as an escaped Argonian slave who became a thief-assassin after winning his freedom with a hatred for the Dunmer.
I’d this one is leaning back in that direction, I’ll check it out sooner rather than later.
The thing I like most is that the procedural stuff is never forced on you. Go pirating a bunch of random ships with random people. Or stick around to the Mars colony. Go exploring random military and science bases, or only go to the ones that were handcrafted. It’s really not hard to avoid the procedural content that bores you if any does. Nothing has bored me so far.
I learn the games I like from “what’s wrong with it”. Here’s what’s “wrong” with Starfield
- It’s not a physics simulator. Ragdoll is about the best you’re getting. The ship-building is unprecedented for an RPG, but not Space Engineers.
- It’s not an action shooter. People ridiculed that guards won’t aggro on you if you happen to shoot near them. There’s a video of someone drawing a minigun outline around a chill guard
- It’s not a seamless space simulator. You get load screens and the bases you’re building are cooler than FO4 but no minecraft. The FPS portion is much more polished than ship-flying.
- It’s not a NY Times bestselling storybook . There’s a few tropey factions and a few obvious plot points. There’s one specific mission where you’ll want to take the “sneak an atomic bomb into the building and reenact Fallout3’s Megaton bad version” strategy whether you play good or evil, but you won’t have that option (you’ll know the one I’m talking about if you see it). In that one case, I’d appreciate a “something good happens if you find a way to slaughter everyone in that boardroom”, but again… not what the game is about.
…all of the above, of course, sums up to “Skyrim in Space”.
That all sounds reasonable. I mean, Skyrim has the classic feature where you stealth shoot an arrow into somebody and they say “Who’s there?” followed by “I guess it was just the wind.” or whatever - with an arrow sticking out of their chest. At some point it just becomes a classic Bethesda aspect of the game. The base building was my least favorite part - but that was more about having to run back to defend stuff rather than just pushing through on side quests.
You nailed it.
My funniest moment is realizing that grenades are better stealth weapons than a pistol. Someone sees you shoot a silenced pistol, you’re screwed. If someone watches you throw a grenade, but you get into hiding fast enough, they don’t put 2 and 2 together between the thing you threw and that random explosion.
I was in a certain important location and accidentally hit the grenade button… So without thinking I ran. Everyone but one died, and nobody was mad at me. So I looted all the corpses, and walked on whistling.
God that reminds me of almost EVERY bad day I had in Fallout games.
What a grand and intoxicating innocence. How amusing. The Nerevar; an Argonian. The gods must be spiting me.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Starfield so far, put about 80 hours in and haven’t finished any of the questlines yet (largely intentionally, partially because I’ll get sucked into another questline and get distracted). I like the outpost building, the ground combat is fun, the space combat is ok, not on the level of Elite or Star Citizen, but still entertaining.
Solid game to me. Maybe it didn’t live up to people’s wildest expectations, but I went in expecting an enjoyable experience and got it. I don’t really get the hate for it.
Make your own opinion, don’t base expectations off of the unwashed masses. Or do, or don’t play it. You do you
I went in with fairly low expectations. I’ve seen Bethesda’s trajectory so mostly knew what to expect. It thoroughly dissapointed me still.
How did you deal with the outpost building? There’s no way to sort items coming into an outpost so eventually the links all get clogged. For me I built a massive stack of containers that it all flows into, but I still have to go through and pull out junk that’s being used less. It sucks to use. I was really looking forward to that part of the game and it’s like they didn’t even consider the user experience with it. That’s not even mentioning decorations not snapping.
From another of my comments:
I was at a talk by Bruce Nesmith for a game development club I was in in college shortly after FO4 released (and also shortly after they filed the trademark for Starfield but before we knew anything).
One thing I remember well is him saying how they messed up with the FO4 dialogue options. Every one was “yes, no (for now), sarcastic yes, and more information.” I had a reasonable amount of faith at least that would be fixed in Starfield. It isn’t, though it’s like they thought it being presented on a wheel was the part people were upset with, not the complete lack of choice. In Starfield the choices are identical but they’re now presented in the classic box at the bottom of the screen.
The lack of sorting is really my only gripe with outposts. Right now, I have everything funneling into one main outpost and accumulating in a massive wall of containers, haven’t really jumped into automated crafting yet. Building aspects have always appealed to me in games, so I’ve enjoyed just optimizing resource collection and setting up a supply chain.
I’m not installing any mods until I finish my first playthrough, but a sorting mod will be my first download.
I didn’t play much Fallout outside of a scratched copy of FO3, so can’t speak to any issues with the dialogue from that perspective. I don’t have any major issues with it
That’s fair. I’ve been initially disappointed on a lot of their games due to the slide from doing basically anything in Daggerfall (but you might get stuck in a wall if you turn a corner too close) to Skyrim’s as-linear-as-open-world-gets approach. And I had about 4-5 false starts in FO4 despite playing all the other releases to the ending. Maybe it’s something that will click.
I do have to say that I am finding the Deck implementation of Cyberpunk unplayable without an external monitor and keyboard, so that sets an additional bar.
I’m pretty sure you won’t like it, at least not until lots of mods fix things. I haven’t gotten around to Daggerfall yet (but with Daggerfall Unity I want to eventually), but I have played everything since Morrowind. I had the same experience as you with FO4, despite actually enjoying the world and game at large. I still haven’t finished the main quest. Starfield is so dumbed down and streamlined. You have almost no agency in the stories. Every single thing is told directly to you even when you’re “uncovering a mystery” and it’s super boring.
I’m gonna keep playing it, I just have better things to do at the moment. I have about 35 hours sunk into it. It will get better in time with updates and mods.
Same, I actually refunded it after 2 hours because I was already bored.
And I like space games.
It’s not Bethesda’s greatest game but it’s not a terrible game in general. I definitely think companies need to stop over hyping their games as some groundbreaking game of the decade only to release a generic RPG.
I definitely think companies need to stop over hyping their games as some groundbreaking game of the decade only to release a generic RPG.
Not really possible when your average gamer will overhype literally anything even without any marketing available. People are just stupid.
Hayao Miyazaki’s latest work have no promotional marketing, hyped up by the fans, made $55million lol.
It’s impossible to not overhype for Bethesda because all the hype they create will get uncontrollably inflated.
Don’t forget the other Miyazaki, they literally posted a single image for an Elden Ring DLC and people have been going crazy about it for half a year.
But capitalism demands that games are overhyped. That hype will inevitably lead to more sales, and to that end it genuinely doesn’t matter if the game itself lives up to it.
Can we really be honest with ourselves for a second. It’s not the greatest game ever and it’s not the worst game ever. It can just be a game that some people like and others don’t.
I personally like it, but I can %100 see why others might not. It doesn’t need to be deeper than that really.
I find the hype of something is inversely proportional to the quality of the end product. If some game company put 7 years into a game and their marketing was, “could be alright, see how you like it”. I’d be all over that shit like white on rice.
That pretty sums modern games up. The graph of marking-hype on X and enjoyment on Y is a buggery slope downwards :-) Sadly so, I might sadly add.
Counterpoint: Devil May Cry 5.
Gotta admit. Dunno the dmc-series at all. So i just take your word for it, random Internet stranger 😊
They hype it up because it works. Half or more of big games budget is marketing, and they make it all back with a good profit.
Exactly. The hype is always bs because in big studio it is literally marketing’s job to embellish/lie to generate hype and sales. Without a marketing dep you will only hear about games through word of mouths which imply the game made it on its own merits.
I wonder how much money was wasted on that Imagine Dragons song, that literally no one cares about now, that should have just been put into development.
This is how I thought everyone felt about Cyberpunk 2077, but even on launch it was a pretty sweet Bethesda-game by CDPR.
The entire time I was playing Starfield I was thinking “man, Cyberpunk 2077 was a really good open world RPG after all.”
Nothing quite like juxtaposition to make something shine.
Cyberpunk is a great open world RPG once you get past the 2-3 hours of mandatory railroaded story missions. Seriously I don’t know how they fucked that part up so badly. It’s like they saw the platinum chip storyline from New Vegas and said “You know that’s cool, but what if instead of letting the player choose we make them watch a feature length movie about this plot?”
They really need a “start me after Konpeki Plaza” mode with a few thousand €$ and a handful of perk points thrown in.
The story is genuinely good but really drags on after you’ve seen it once or twice. I have the “skip dialogue” button setup to a macro that spams it like 50 times and a quick button on my mouse to trigger it.
It’s all pretty baffling when you realize there are multiple genuinely good and well thought out builds in the game that are effectively mutually exclusive without a way to reset your perks, so you really need to restart the game to see them, but this is my third run through and I can’t imagine doing this again any time soon.
I’m sure there will be a mod for it eventually. Right now there are save files for each background that have already done Act 1, which is probably what I’ll use for future playthroughs.
CDPR releasing Phantom Liberty after Starfield is a genius move. I immediately bought Phantom Liberty after finishing a Starfield run.
They just launched too early, but tried hard to fix everything. I played it some weeks/months after release and had ZERO bugs (not counting some minor texture-issues, who cares). And another run recently. Absolutely gorgeous world, and one of the best story and story-telling and characters of the last many many years.
Though I obviously was lucky, as many had massive problems with the game. But then again, people with much shittier systems than mine could game starfield fine, while I couldn’t at all.
Okay, I just want to clear up that bugs were not the only reason people were upset. They literally were hyping things up prerelease that weren’t even in the game. That’s why they spent so much time being sued in the EU for it.
The writing is also amateurish, and there’s a lot of ‘cyber’ but not a lot of ‘punk’. People were right to be upset, and personally I think they still should be. The only reason their PR got turned around was because of an anime that released based in the world, and now suddenly the game’s being handed ‘labor of love’ awards—they hadn’t even done much to fix up the game at that point!
So yeah. Not just bugs. I’m sure I’m even missing things.
Well, the problem is: I don’t care for pre-release hype/hate. I try on my own with unclouded judgement. So I didn’t know what they were promising or not. Who cares what marketing-departments puke out? They never are on par with the actual thing.
As for the rest. If you consider the writing ‘amateurish’ then a) I must be easily entertained, as I found it great (for a game) b) what GREAT writing in games have you recently had? Without sarcasm, the bar is low with AAA. c) considering it was one of the very very few SciFi-RPGs, it surely was one of the best. There are just so many without dragons and wizards and elves for a change.
Honstely, I don’t know what you want to be fixed, I had two runthroughs with zero problems. Everything worked perfectly fine for what I needed a mod to make it perfectly fine in the first run.
To me, they earn a labour-of-love-whatever-award. It works, it’s great, it’s worth it’s asking-price. Surely better than Starfield, Diablo4 and whatever else recent AAA-fails were brought upon us.
IMHO at least. And no, I’m no fanboy or hater, I don’t care for those things. No bugs and I’m having fun => I’m happy, I buy again. Bugs and I don’t have fun => Fork you in the eye.
Okay, but this was more than prerelease hype. This was showing footage to players things they can do, with the explicit intention of driving up pre-orders and day one sales (I think pre-ordering is extremely silly, I don’t participate, but that’s neither here nor there). Lying about your product to get people to pay $60 for it is extremely unethical, and some EU governments found it to be enough to take them to court over. So this is beyond your personal ‘judgments’. Sorry.
Limiting this arbitrary contest to just AAA games is pretty silly, seeing as they have the budget to hire amazing writers, and some of them get blown out of the water by indie titles. That’s not the argument you think it is. Gaming is just wider than that, and I would argue the boundaries should be expanded to include all entertainment seeing as all forms of entertainment are making a bid for your limited time/attention, but that’s just me. If you must have ONLY AAA games, then Red Dead games, GTA, and Mass Effect games are some from off the top of my head. Granted I don’t play that many.
Your bar for labor-of-love must be really really low if a game just working is enough for you. That same year, No Man’s Sky was much more deserving of the award as it isn’t being made by a corporation with endless resources, and yet it managed to improve itself at least twice as much.
Tbh, you writing out several paragraphs defending yourself for enjoying Cyberpunk kinda smells like fanboy behavior to me. You try to be reductionist and dismissive a lot in what you wrote, which is pretty lame and anti-intellectual. We’re here to discuss the facts, not what you enjoy spending your money on. More power to you, spend your money however, but I’m not here to discuss that with you.
Nah man. I’m far from fanboy. I hate the industry nowadays. I don’t preorder either. For AAA i download and try first before even thinking of spending a buck. And i didn’t hesitate to spend 100 moneyz on pacman and co when they came out.
And again: i don’t care for promises, videos and whatever else marketing pukes out. It will never come close. Their job is to sell things that will never exist and the devs can’t fulfill. I noticed cyberpunk was to be released some day, it was from cdpr (so it got a positive prejudice) and i had a good experience. Johnny alone was memorable enough of a character. Friends told me how shitty and buggy it was, never noticed. Though i played with many mods as that time, dunno if it had sucked without. Didn’t know, didn’t care. Had fun. After finishing, i bought it. And months later i did the second playthrough. And in some months i’ll gonna get the dlc and play a last time.
Where is a fanboy here? If it had sucked, i would’nt have spent a cent. If i was a fanboy, i would’ve preordered 😁
Maybe YOU sound like being a victim of confirmation-bias after you felt victim of the hype and lost moneyz. Would be only fair after calling me a fanboy 😊
And no, I’m no AAA-sucker. Many one-man-indies rock over multi-million-titles. AAA mostly just suck ass (nowadays).
And yes. Lying about products suck and should be forbidden. But it ain’t and won’t. So we can just ignore the silly marketing alltogether. Pirate their shit, evaluate in peace (as demos died), and make solid purchase-decision AFTERWARDS.
The lack of rpg choices makes it less bethesda to me.
The only hoices that mattered were the ones that affected the silverhand percentages, and which ending you ulimately chose.
The lack of rpg choices makes it less bethesda to me
You mean the games where the dialogue choices are:
- Yes
- Sarcastic yes
- More info/persuasion
- No for now (but yes later)
The checks on certain traits and skills you may have that bypass thing that could gove shottcuts or prevent a fight, e.g Starfield has a LOT of points where persuation would prevent a fight from breaking out, get you more credits, or offer an alternative solution to a conversation.
And its not like I havent played either game, ive already finished both CP2077 and Starfield effectively (minus the recent 2077 expansion)
There’s also some choices in the relationships V can take, but they don’t change everything much. That said, I think I makes sense that what V does wouldn’t really have much of an effect on Night City.
The choices in relationships basically unlock endings. The game a distinct lack of alternative methods to complete missions via statcheck, which is very bethesda to me.
There are some, but its very few. For instance i went almost full cyberrunner but my cyberrunner abilities didnt give me alternative skips to many missions
I’m only watching someone play through but it’s just poorly written too. Every single person you meet knows you’re the main character and begs for your help.
Not really, many many of them are surprised when you offer to help
That seems to be more choices than any other Bethesda RP game. They got ahold of TES and Fallout and completely stripped out the idea of RPG “choices.” Gone are the days in TES and Fallout that one could role play as someone other than “the chosen one.” I’ll never defend Arena or Daggerfall for their graphics, but no game studio has put out a game since those two that literally allows the player to totally ignore the main quest line, with in game consequences for that. Nope. Time doesn’t matter, you’re the chosen one, and will “get around to it.” As far as I can tell, there is basically only one ending to any of these Bethesda “RPGs,” and no matter what choices you make, you’ll find that ending if you slog through enough “quests.”
Admittedly, I’ve never played fallout 1 or 2, though I own them, so I don’t actually know if the world building was as detailed as it was in Arena and Daggerfall.
Bethesda has always relied on modders to fix their platforms for them. They don’t make games. They make platforms that other people can mod to make the games that they wanted to make.
Starfield itself was a step up from FO4, which almost lacked those entirely. Persuation was heavily used, and some of thr character traits you picked at the start led for unique chat dialogues, some just being extra chatter. But others allowing you to bypass an event because you had x trait.
Imo, Starfield isnt goty by any means, but it was virtually a step up from FO4 in almost all fronts except for exploration. Gunplay was better, rpgness was better, factions are better, customization was better. Skill tree imo was better.
Try BG3, literally everything matters, almost everything is a choice with consequences and i don’t even know what the main plot is anymore since I am overwhelmed with possible choices
Oh I will. My current game that I’m waiting on is Cities Skylines 2, but I’ll probably pick up BG3 around the New Year.
Accurate. But props to Bethesda for not including Denuvo so I didn’t have to feel cheated by paying for it.
They dont ivlude denuvo because it wouls effectively make modding harder, in particular, script extenders
People can say all they want about how dated the creation engine is, but its inclusion is the reason why modeing is significantly easier and the executable isnt riddled with drm
I told my friend months ago that as far as I can recall of all the Bethesda games I’ve played, in vanilla they are all at best, good. Skyrim and Fallout 3 are probably the pinnacle of their gaming achievements, but they are good, not great. The ability to mods their games into a Thomas the Tank Engine, Gothic horror, telenovela hellscape abomination is what makes those games great.
Starfield I think will be the same. It’s an ok game, but when the mods start really rolling in is when it will be worth playing.
Imo starfield has a lot of potential strictly because theres soo many planets you can choose to do mods on. Its proceedural vastness will give modders room to do stuff without overlapping with other mods.
Do i think Starfield is the best, far no, its better than FO4 to me, but worse than its 3d predecessors for FO/TES, but it leaves a lot of room for potential due to how much customization already exists in thr game.
agree, the core mechanics of the game I think are fine, the only real criticism I have is some of the visuals don’t look their place in 2023, mods will help here. I’ve always enjoyed the Bethesda RPG playstyle so the game just feels good to me, I’ll admit I expected spaceflight to be more than it is, but I am also ok with it
I intentially skipped all that hype on Starfield because I don’t trust Bethesda, and it’s starting to look like I was right.
Just like i said when it was announced
Bethesda is a shitty game dev studio… lol
I never watched any trailer because i assumed that’s what the game will be like. But after watching some gameplay, it’s somehow worse. Some things look really good, it has these trailer moments. But some textures for example are straight up 480p. A part of me thought that they learned from fallout 4 or fallout 76, but that’s not how you print money, right?
The fact alone that the UI is laughably bad, is just one thing, but the loading times, in a game where you spend so much time opening and closing your inventory shouldn’t be accepted, ESPECIALLY since a modder fixed their UI on day one. But SOMEHOW there are people out there defending that bullshit. If i would care for Bethesda games and spending ours collecting space trash, i’d be livid. Their next game i 6 years will still be just a bit better looking than skyrim.The thing that really gets me is that the game can’t run on a normal HDD. Despite being as sectioned off as it is by loading screens, and the graphics being pretty standard for a modern AAA game, it literally requires an SSD to run.
The only other game I’ve encountered that requires an SSD is Baldur’s Gate 3, and even that runs perfectly fine on a normal HDD, so long as you don’t mind occasionally waiting for stuff to load in after a loading screen.
The game they published before this one was Redfall so I went into this release expecting that
At first, I thought the quality seemed “meh” because it was released so close after the masterpiece that was Baldur’s Gate 3. Everyone had high expectations and that’s a hard game to follow, I believed.
After removing myself from Baldur’s Gate 3, I discovered that I was wrong. Starfield still a “meh” game when taken on its own.
My personal biggest disappointment is the repeating point of interest. Yesterday I was on two planets and both had, even on the same planet itself, three times the same mine shaft, twice the same outpost, twice the same hole in the ground, with even mobs and ore placed on the same spots.
Seriously, this should never happen under any circumstances. It was the first time in the game I kind of felt the negative grow. While I still enjoy the rest.
That said, it’s also true that the game is average in many aspects, which is enough to be enjoyable for me but not others.
I didn have this once, 2 planets with identical mines, even had the same dead bodies in the same spots
Will Skyrim remain as Bethesda’s greatest triumph? Find out in the next episode of Elder Ball Z: “Skyrim is the greatest after all”
240 times. It took me two minutes to finish the “minigame” last time I did it. That’s 8 hours of grinding to max out every skill. Not 8 hours of fun gameplay and visually interesting dragon fights and dungeon crawls, 8 hours (that’s eight hours) of flying from one shiny spot to the next. Eight. 8. Hours. Of slow-ass zero G floating.
Last time I booted the game up, I fast traveled to my ship, took off, and heard Sarah say she has something for me. Something about that same line played for the millionth time absolutely killed my motivation to play, and I haven’t started the game up in like a week. The romance system is too much too fast. I went from “flirting” with Sarah to married in like 4 hours. We’ve known each other for all of one in-game month. Maybe I’m just a broken person, but the way we talk sounds so disingenuously infatuated.
I think about the concept of playing, and it sounds fun in theory, but realistically what am I gonna get done in the next 8 hours? I’ll talk to people that I don’t care about to move through a story that I’m fundamentally disinterested in because I know that >!in order to max out the dragon shou–I mean, Starborn powers, I’ll need to jump through and abandon alternate universes like Rick Sanchez but not as an ironic critique of internet nihilism. Hours and hours and hours wasted on >!timelines I don’t care about just to get to the end game where I… have strong powers and a good ship, and can’t connect with any of the characters because they’ll be the tenth iteration of the same ones that I could never convince myself to care about before.!<
Maybe in a year or two after the game has been updated, I’ll check it out again. Maybe I can shut my brain off for a minute and pretend I’m not >!grinding through universes!< if it doesn’t take me eight hours to max out all the powers. Or maybe I’ll just play BG3 when it comes to Xbox and forget that Starfield ever existed in the first place
The fact BG3 came out just before Starfield made me dislike the game even more than I probably would have I think. I went from playing probably the best RPG ever to Starfield, which doesn’t even try to make you think you’re playing any role except the chosen one. The fact that you join Constellation and almost instantly become not just a full member, but the person who everyone else takes orders from is rediculous.
The story sucks, the gameplay is bland, and there are so many friction points that constantly make you think about the fact you’re playing a game. It’s honestly sad. I love sci-fi so I was reasonably excited for the game, even knowing it’d be a modern Bethesda game, and it still let me down. The sci-fi concepts in the game aren’t even done well.
The release timing is unfortunate.
It really does show that Bethesda are running about 10 years behind everyone else.
It cost them twice as much to make as BG3 did. How? Just compare any BG3 character and how animated they are thanks to full motion capture, to the same Bethesda animatronics they’ve used since forever.
It is not unfortunate, it is a strategic win by Larian. BG3 was actually supposed to come very late, but Larian released it early after learning about Starfield’s release date.
They needn’t have worried. At all.
People are even talking about Cyberpunk 2077 favourably again. That’s how much shit Starfield is getting.
Cyberpunk 2077 was good (on PC) when It came out, and now it’s great. It has earned that favourable talk.
The feeling I got playing BG3 or even skyrim was one of “I can’t wait to try this again with X group/build/decision”. With starfield I don’t know if I’ll ever even get to the point of fucking off on a random adventure, let alone finish the story.
Part of my problem with Starfield is that the builds are basically pointless. Your background only gives you perk points in a few skills, and the only background worth using is Bounty Hunter since those three skills are absolute necessities for playing the game. Your traits matter more, but you can get absolute duds. I thought I had some strong role playing potential with a Freestar Enlightened whose parents are still alive… but those traits suck and don’t work together in the slightest. As an Enlightened Atheist, I have access to a chest with some hot garbage in a location on Jemeson that I had no reason to visit until past level 30. As a Freestar, I have some “unique” dialogue options that boil down to “I’m also from Akila! There are Ashtas!” My parents were really cool to have around… until I found out that giving me an ass garbage ship is the last thing they ever do. They’re also UC, so I have no idea how my character is from Akila. My grandma was a UC marine in the war, and I’m wearing her Freestar-killing duds now. I couldn’t even invite them to my wedding. My wife’s big character quest has to do with her Freestar-killing ship crashing on a planet, and I don’t recall there even being a dialogue option about those being my people she was killing back then.
Why are my parents UC if I’m Freestar? Why can’t I invite them to my wedding? Why aren’t they enlightened? Surely Bethesda could have spent some of the last decade making 16 sets of parents to account for the 4x4 possible combinations of religion and background. Nah, they spent all that time making an absolute assload of crewmates you can and never will hire.
The fact that you join Constellation and almost instantly become not just a full member, but the person who everyone else takes orders from is rediculous.
Uhh have you played any other Bethesda title. If anything, the most common seniment is that game starts off very slow because its reletively speaking, the least ridiculous start conpared to most of the 3d bethesda games.
The opening sequence is slow, but no other game do you become essentially the faction leader so quickly. I guess maybe the blades in Skyrim, except you aren’t really the leader, just the person it’s supposed to protect, it’s one person, and it’s much further into the game.
Sarah is considered the leader of constellation, ad the game talks about how she got into her position and previous leaders of constellation.
Sure. That doesn’t explain why I can tell constellation members to go work for me in my outpost. Them being companions is fine. Then being crew mates is alright (though don’t they have other things they need to do?). Them being sweatshop workers is dumb. You’re not technically the leader, but you are more than anyone else is. Sarah is in name only, but she takes orders from you. Everything that happens revolves around you, despite the other Starborn seeming to have had their own agency in other loops. Maybe we’re only successful this loop because they decided to stop doing anything on their own?
best RPG ever
Disco Elysium would like a word.
I love both. A lot.
Minish Cap master race 😞
There are dozens of us.
I really don’t understand how they green lit that design choice.
It was like Ubisoft towers on crack.
“Let’s take the least interesting gameplay mechanic possible, and then gate one of the only interesting mechanics behind it. And then let’s also make it take a few minutes of jetpacking around a barren planet to get there beforehand, to really jazz it up.”
Todd: “Yes, exactly! See that temple over there? Your can go there. And go there. And go there again. And again. And again. And again. Again. Again. Again.”
Devs look at each other…
“Is Toddbot broken or is this good gameplay design? Kenny, are you writing this shit down?”
I can believe that one of them played the little temple minigame once and thought it was cool, but unless they’re literal space aliens, I cannot imagine the thought of doing that for eight hours even crossed their mind.
Those temples are so weak. Getting the dragon powers felt somewhat primal. But floating through a bit of space dust, not so much
If you are trying to grind an RPG, you are playing it wrong.
This isn’t Dark Souls. Nor would I want it to be.
Anon is not wrong.
