this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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It’s not really “both” from a space simulator perspective. There’s no option to fly down to a planet and skim the surface, there’s no option to fly from planet to planet without a loading screen (or even just to a moon), etc.
Starfield is a good RPG set in space and I’m enjoying it, but I think it’s fair to criticize that it was marketed like it was going to be a space sim by Bethesda and that’s not really what we got. If you were excited about the simulator part you are going to be disappointed.
I really have no idea where anyone got the idea it was a space sim from. They showed a good bit of gameplay that made it very clear that it was a traditional Bethesda game, with much more modern mechanics, set in space.
Back to the reviewers primary issue that in a traditional Bethesda game you experience the journey of going from one place to another, at least for the first time. Starfield has none of that. You never experience the journey of traveling to a new location, you just teleport. So effectively you are constantly disoriented, with no Tru sense of scale or journey.
The issue would be believing anything not explicitly said or shown in a pre release showcase. You don't expect anything not extremely, extremely obvious or you just let yourself down and then blame the studio for underdelivering.
A bunch of that is of course the fault of marketing itself, but this goes for almost anything marketed ever, beyond video games.
Oh hype cycles are wild.
I got a slightly better (though slightly harder to run on steam deck) version of what I expected after watching the direct. It's exactly what I wanted it to be.
It's just silly how people turn unsubstantiated wild speculation into some kind of unmet feature set.
I mean, there are parts of the game's major criticisms that are understandable and do impact the game experience in a way. The worst one for me is the lack of a local map. I've gotten lost in cities or complexly laid out buildings a number of times already, which is, suffice to say, not enjoyable and nigh on unforgivably clumsy to experience repeatedly.
I'll forgive, or even enjoy, say, Dark Souls for the same thing because it's not as complicatedly laid out and the world is smaller and much more visually distinct in its areas to make it up on the back end, along with the entire design ethos being very hands off in terms of delivering info to the player, which sets a standard compared to Starfield's polished to a sheen experience, which suddenly becomes less so in other spots, creating a negative contrast.
Others, like the lack of seamless planet to space transitions were never advertised, and though having them certainly increases immersion, visual spectacle, and thus perceived enjoyment and value of a game, is not really important in the grand scheme unless you wrongly expected it. I don't have enough time to worry about a planet transition, I'm thinking about what I'm gonna do there and what I'm gonna do next within the gameplay itself. With this sort of criticism, the game would be undoubtedly better with such a feature if it wouldn't have delayed development too significantly to implement, which no one can really say for sure.
Then there are criticisms like the fact that planets are limited in scale and you can't fly your ship close to the ground on the surface, which is just wildly beyond the scope of what Bethesda would be able to deliver and still say it's the same game. That would've been so complex it would've sacrificed other features undoubtedly, and shows more about a given player's desire for "Starfield 2: We Added all That Space Sim Stuff People Wanted that we couldn't before because we'd end up like Star Citizen" than it really does about Starfield's successes or failures in the features it explicitly attempted to deliver.
It's not a space sim and was never intended to be one. They made it clear almost a year ago that it didn't have stuff like surface flying or atmo to space transitions. If you were still thinking it had this stuff at launch your weren't paying attention.