Well you’re not wrong about ME but my observation was most of the flaws it had on release was that it’s primary loops (combat especially) were very rough and in some ways kind of gimped by too strict adherence to ttrpg rules like weapons skills. Most everyone agreed it’s world building, characters and overall story were damn good.
Starfield - No Man's Bethesda
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
- Start date
To be honest, those "star trek-ish" scifi games made by western studios all kinda feel sameish to me so this being compared to ME is totally believable. I think Outer Worlds was advertised as "fallout in space" but it too was similar. I always was more for the science fantasy type of things like SW and Dune and so on. As far as games that do this, only a couple scratch that itch and they tend to be Japanese. Stuff like Star Ocean or hell even the new Honkai Star Rail (which is insane to say about a phone game, but it is true), and of course Rogue Galaxy from the ps2 days (I think it got a psn port at some time but it wasn't dual audio so I haven't checked it out). Yes, there's not been many of those. But the few that exist were all great.
I just got to the first major city, the capital of post earth humanity... and expectedly it's made up of about 20 buildings.
It's the sort of thing that makes you realize just how much Bethesda's approach to making games is stuck in the 00's. I like a lot of the games sleek but somewhat grounded futuristic aesthetics, which makes it all the funnier how much the actual game feels like a relic from a time with lower standards.
It's the sort of thing that makes you realize just how much Bethesda's approach to making games is stuck in the 00's. I like a lot of the games sleek but somewhat grounded futuristic aesthetics, which makes it all the funnier how much the actual game feels like a relic from a time with lower standards.
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Honestly, I kind of hate that about modern gaming. I'd prefer there to be 20 buildings all worth taking a look inside than 1000 filled with hundreds of nameless NPCs. Though I guess that clashes with Starfield's procgen planets.
That's a bit how I felt about the way Bethesda was going. Around Fallout 3 / Morrowind you had real, unique special / magic items. Fallout 4 and Skyrim, everything seems generic. And the problem with allowing crafting to make anything special is that nothing is special anymore.
Reading criticisms of the weak plot is disappointing. When you're spending that much on a game, is it really asking that much to spend a few extra bucks on the writing?
Wow, it sure is a Bethesda game, alright. Only with writing that's somehow worse than any of their previous games. I honestly feel like skipping every single line of dialogue. Here's the thing - every TES managed to grab me in the first hour or so. I'm 7h in, and I am not feeling this game at all. Something happened to Bethesda after Skyrim that made them kinda suck. I didn't enjoy Fallout 4 almost at all, and this game seems to be heading in the same direction of mediocrity.
Starfield just doesn't feel like some groundbreaking AAA game, or even a game released in 2023. If this game had come out in 2017 or something, I could sort of understand the praise that it is getting. But this? This is just bad.
It's almost literally just Fallout 4 with a different coat of paint.
I'm gonna give it another 10h or so to see if I get hooked, since I can't refund it at this point.
EDIT: Actually, you know what? I won't. I won't waste another 10h on this. Maybe next year when a bunch of mods are released. But I got better things to do now than to waste my time playing a bad game.
Starfield just doesn't feel like some groundbreaking AAA game, or even a game released in 2023. If this game had come out in 2017 or something, I could sort of understand the praise that it is getting. But this? This is just bad.
It's almost literally just Fallout 4 with a different coat of paint.
I'm gonna give it another 10h or so to see if I get hooked, since I can't refund it at this point.
EDIT: Actually, you know what? I won't. I won't waste another 10h on this. Maybe next year when a bunch of mods are released. But I got better things to do now than to waste my time playing a bad game.
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So I have now sunk in about 10 hours into the game and I can safely say it's...a Bethesda game. I mean the game exists more as just a sort of playground of sorts and it is up to the player to just do stuff. The quests are all rather mundane in what they want you to do, and exist simply to provide you context for doing random things. Mostly fetch questing to be honest, though with the twist of provide you some variation on how you achieve fetching those quests and who you ultimately turn the quest item in to.
See the problem I have at the core of Bethesda games is the lack of purpose or achievable goals. I spent two hours helping the security forces in the first city you go to before even starting the main quest. I made a bunch of money helping out around the city and I realized that it's doing that Bethesda thing of procedurally giving me infinite things to do with no sense of completion. I hate that more than anything in the world. I don't mind there being a LOT of stuff to do, so long as there is a clear "finish" to the stuff. But when the game will shit out stuff forever you never get any accomplishment or completion feeling from it, nor do you have a sense of being "done".
That being said what is on offer with Starfield is a frankly huge sandbox to fuck around in. However that sandbox requires a lot of loading. Load into the ship, load into space, load into orbit for the next planet, load landing on the planet, loading out of the ship onto the planet, load into the city or space port of the planet, etc etc etc. Loads are everywhere and if you aren't playing on an SSD I think you'd probably just go crazy trying to play the game. Even on a good SSD it's annoying.
The UI is absolutely horrid, nothing is clear, and navigating around (especially the galaxy map) is clunky and doesn't respond well. There are times when I have to click on a planet 5 or 6 times to get the game to acknowledge im trying to fucking land on the planet. It's hard to tell what's what with resource scanning as well because the whole thing just isn't clear on it. Trying to buy shit or worse yet upgrade and customize your ship is extremely unclear and hard to piece together. It's hard to figure out what the upgrade will do, how much it will cost, and how it will impact the ship. It's a horrible mess of a UI that hopefully modders will fix because anything is better than this garbage.
Controlling your starship also sucks. It's floaty which might make sense, but it's also extremely annoying when it comes to space battles, because you have several systems to manage at once while also dealing with an unwieldy control system for flight, and also trying to keep track of enemy ships that constantly blow past you. It's hard to tell what's a shield bar and what's a health bar as well, but it also doesn't really seem to matter as you just blast away with everything you got and the result will be the same.
Starfield's biggest issue is that it just feels old. The shit on offer here from quest design to the way everything works on a technical level in the game feels ten years out of date. The constant need to load shit, the way NPC's just fucking stare expressionless at you and exposite dialog to you, the shitty quest design of fetch questing and when you aren't fetching you are following or escorting an NPC and that NPC of course moves very slow and also gets stuck on the environment constantly. AI in the game is dumb as bricks to where the tactic of moving side to side will pretty much win you every firefight.
However the design that annoys me the absolute most is the fucking inventory weight limit. Because reasons. In a game where you are mining for minerals and resources on other planets, picking up weapons and spacesuits, new gear, health items, you are picking up things non-stop and yet.....there is a weight limit forcing you to give shit to companions, or shove shit into the ships storage but also having to remember where you kept everything because you can't use items in your storage. Which means before you use a research station or crafting bench you gotta make sure you visit your chest and take all the materials out before going to craft, and don't forget to put all your leftovers back otherwise you'll be over encumbered before you realize it. It's not only a bad gameplay system in a game like this, but it's also incredibly outdated.
They really need to either make a new engine or move development over to a new pre-made engine like Unreal or something because the limitations on what their old shit will let them do is holding them back, while also making their games look and feel bad now. We've moved beyond loading screens, beyond blank expressionless dialogs, limited carry capacities, fetch and escort quests. It's time to shift the ideas into the new age.
Thankfully the game isn't super buggy, except it crashes a lot. When it's working though it runs fine on my system, keeping a steady 70fps.
Look Starfield isn't a great game by any means. It's fine to run around and fuck with stuff for a while and depending how much you liked Skyrim your mileage will vary with this as well. If you put 1000's of hours into Skyrim, you'll probably do the same here because it's the same experience with a different theme painted over it.
Starfield is not the disaster I expected coming form Fallout 76, but it's also not a great game either. It's okay.
See the problem I have at the core of Bethesda games is the lack of purpose or achievable goals. I spent two hours helping the security forces in the first city you go to before even starting the main quest. I made a bunch of money helping out around the city and I realized that it's doing that Bethesda thing of procedurally giving me infinite things to do with no sense of completion. I hate that more than anything in the world. I don't mind there being a LOT of stuff to do, so long as there is a clear "finish" to the stuff. But when the game will shit out stuff forever you never get any accomplishment or completion feeling from it, nor do you have a sense of being "done".
That being said what is on offer with Starfield is a frankly huge sandbox to fuck around in. However that sandbox requires a lot of loading. Load into the ship, load into space, load into orbit for the next planet, load landing on the planet, loading out of the ship onto the planet, load into the city or space port of the planet, etc etc etc. Loads are everywhere and if you aren't playing on an SSD I think you'd probably just go crazy trying to play the game. Even on a good SSD it's annoying.
The UI is absolutely horrid, nothing is clear, and navigating around (especially the galaxy map) is clunky and doesn't respond well. There are times when I have to click on a planet 5 or 6 times to get the game to acknowledge im trying to fucking land on the planet. It's hard to tell what's what with resource scanning as well because the whole thing just isn't clear on it. Trying to buy shit or worse yet upgrade and customize your ship is extremely unclear and hard to piece together. It's hard to figure out what the upgrade will do, how much it will cost, and how it will impact the ship. It's a horrible mess of a UI that hopefully modders will fix because anything is better than this garbage.
Controlling your starship also sucks. It's floaty which might make sense, but it's also extremely annoying when it comes to space battles, because you have several systems to manage at once while also dealing with an unwieldy control system for flight, and also trying to keep track of enemy ships that constantly blow past you. It's hard to tell what's a shield bar and what's a health bar as well, but it also doesn't really seem to matter as you just blast away with everything you got and the result will be the same.
Starfield's biggest issue is that it just feels old. The shit on offer here from quest design to the way everything works on a technical level in the game feels ten years out of date. The constant need to load shit, the way NPC's just fucking stare expressionless at you and exposite dialog to you, the shitty quest design of fetch questing and when you aren't fetching you are following or escorting an NPC and that NPC of course moves very slow and also gets stuck on the environment constantly. AI in the game is dumb as bricks to where the tactic of moving side to side will pretty much win you every firefight.
However the design that annoys me the absolute most is the fucking inventory weight limit. Because reasons. In a game where you are mining for minerals and resources on other planets, picking up weapons and spacesuits, new gear, health items, you are picking up things non-stop and yet.....there is a weight limit forcing you to give shit to companions, or shove shit into the ships storage but also having to remember where you kept everything because you can't use items in your storage. Which means before you use a research station or crafting bench you gotta make sure you visit your chest and take all the materials out before going to craft, and don't forget to put all your leftovers back otherwise you'll be over encumbered before you realize it. It's not only a bad gameplay system in a game like this, but it's also incredibly outdated.
They really need to either make a new engine or move development over to a new pre-made engine like Unreal or something because the limitations on what their old shit will let them do is holding them back, while also making their games look and feel bad now. We've moved beyond loading screens, beyond blank expressionless dialogs, limited carry capacities, fetch and escort quests. It's time to shift the ideas into the new age.
Thankfully the game isn't super buggy, except it crashes a lot. When it's working though it runs fine on my system, keeping a steady 70fps.
Look Starfield isn't a great game by any means. It's fine to run around and fuck with stuff for a while and depending how much you liked Skyrim your mileage will vary with this as well. If you put 1000's of hours into Skyrim, you'll probably do the same here because it's the same experience with a different theme painted over it.
Starfield is not the disaster I expected coming form Fallout 76, but it's also not a great game either. It's okay.
So it's a 7th generation open world game that came out around the end of the 360's/PS3's life cycle? That sounds about right.
Ironic, as that's the purpose of both the Series X and PS5 especially. Reduce load times, or make them almost non-existent.
So yet another over hyped game, charged at premium price, running on an ancient engine that is just average, and only gets better with fan mods? History repeats itself once a-fucking-gain. None of us are surprised in the slightest, and I am so glad to have no interests in this game. Time for the real games to step on through.
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Yep, thank god I decided against buying this bloated piece of a 7th gen experience. I mean I'll take Dishonored/Prey any day over this game, because of smaller scale allows for replayability. IIRC, in Dishonored it only takes few hours unlock the powers you want, and then you still are encouraged to experiment how you want to proceed with each mission. No need to spend dozens of hours until your build fleshes out.
I think if Ubisoft succeeds with AC Mirage, maybe it'll show Xbox/Bethesda games do not need to be big.
And now I want a Ubisoft game to do well. Fuck.
I think if Ubisoft succeeds with AC Mirage, maybe it'll show Xbox/Bethesda games do not need to be big.
And now I want a Ubisoft game to do well. Fuck.
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Dont hold your breath for that to happen though. I feel like anytime Ubisoft does well, it's entirely accidental.
As an avid Bethesda hater, i must sadly withold from griping about their newest game, as i don't want to be jumbled together with ponies and anti-woke tubers.
Critical support to Captain Todd
Critical support to Captain Todd
That certainly sounds much better than "Skyrim in space", although i also heard opinions that it's exactly what it is.People may be expecting "Fallout / Elder Scrolls in space", but it's actually No Man's Sky, Star Citizen or Eliteangerous with some more RPGish elements: a procedurally generated sandbox, rather than a conventional strong narrative RPG.
I also wonder whether Starfield is a sort of "filler".
So, imagine you've got some big ideas for what to do with your games, and you want to see how they'll work out. This could be very expensive. So what you do is create a sort of "test game", and release it because then you can get revenue for it. But what's it's really there to do is to try out some new technologies and ideas that will be going into your real products (i.e. Fallout and Elder Scrolls). So create a new IP to do this, without the risk of damaging the reputations of your real cash cow series in case things don't turn out that well.
A fresh IP also helps fill the release gap caused by the online variants of your cash cows, because the minute you release a major single-player game in those series, it'll crash the online version player numbers, which is a big no-no whilst they're still relatively fresh and profitable.
Starfield: "25 years in the making... a second-rate idea we shoved into a corner until it was expedient to brush the dust and cobwebs off".
I'm in the fortunate position of this game barely being on my radar (my radar for games is shit because I don't read any gaming press or watch videos) until now so I haven't built this up in my head to be the Second Coming of Gaming. Having read all the bad reviews I'm almost definitely going to buy it still. I mean, it can't be a worse bait and switch that NMS, which I definitely bought based on hype.
I'm slightly fucked off with it because some other games I want to play more announced a delay in their release dates in case they were completely overshadowed by the marketing blast around it.