Games

Agreed, at first I wasn't excited about it but as the quests opened up I was in. I'm on the "new game+" right now and seeing what else I can mess up lol.

My quests tend to end in a lot of shooting innocents... I don't know why that keeps happening. It can't be anything I'm doing...

Same. I've got thousands of hours in Skyrim. It's my favourite game of all time. But I'm more into sci fi than fantasy generally and Starfield is shaping up to be everything I would've asked for. It's taken over my life and I have no regrets. Bethesda smashed it again.

Yeah you put it really well.

I generally feel the same way about all Bethesda games. I'll return after some DLC and Mods have been released.

There is some pretty cringe writing and stylistic choices this time around. Space cowboys and Freestar were conceptualized by a child and the PG pirate brigade are embarassing.

There are some bones for a pretty great empire building mod though. Can't wait to see a sim-settlements type mod for Starfield.

Same, I pirated it to give it a try, put in a few dozen hours to make sure I'm not missing anything but left pretty disappointed tbh. It has a strong interesting opening but the more you try to get into the nitty gritty details, the more shallow and flawed the game becomes until you're just doing chores for the sake of it. Some people find enjoyment in these chores but it ain't me, maybe in a few years it becomes better. I got phantom liberty instead and am having a blast there instead

I didn't expect the game to be the best thing since sliced bread. I expected it to be a Bethesda game in space. That's exactly what I got and I've enjoyed every minute of it.

Once I changed my mindset to "this map of the solar system is really just like a flat plane in Fallout New Vegas, except with extra steps" then I was able to enjoy it more. I think games like No Mans Sky spoiled people in terms of an engaging space travel mechanic, even though Bethesda was honest from the beginning about there not being transitions into/out of planet atmospheres.

The opening story about joining Constellation was pretty weak though.

A lot of folks just got hyped up because hype and didn't understand that this was a Bethesda game and was always going to be a Bethesda game.

Anyone who understood it was a Bethesda game, seems quite happy with the product.

My hot take on Bethesda is, they simply don't do game design. They take their previous game, slap whatever is the fashionable mechanic of the day on top, and just roll with the punches until it sorta kinda works.

They haven't done any real game design probably since Morrowind. Since then they've added weapon armor crafting in skyrim, base building and weapon customization in fallout 4, and now in starfield they're adding procedural planets, resource mining, Ship building... the game is collapsing under sheer feature count.

The problem for me is, it's not enhancing the core Bethesda experience; they are rather diluting it. All this extra crap just distracts from the actual thing I want from a Bethesda game, which is a big open designed world filled with interesting locations, characters and quests that you're free to discover as you like. The procedural content especially is, like, antithetical to the formula.

I believe it amplifies some of the worst aspects of their games. If I think back to what I liked about Oblivion, it was a world that felt lived in. Objects had purpose, characters had homes, content was discovered. It relied a lot on procedural content, but it felt like there was a strong level of cohesion between the procedural elements and mechanics. The disparate aspects of the game fed into one another. With Starfield, you get this huge increase in scope, but each individual part feels kind of empty and boring and clunky and slow.

Here's a contrasting example:

In Oblivion, imagine if you wanted to steal something from a vendor. You have to wait for night, you have to pick the lock, items have actual value, you have to stealth in case they catch you, you know if they can see you, there are other things to do in the city in the meantime, and during all this you might find something unexpected along the way that completely tangents you off into a different direction. All these elements come together to create interesting player stories, and none if it needs to be tied to any guided narrative.

In Starfield, all of these elements fall apart. The scope of the game means you're constantly fast travelling from location to location. No single location has too much going on, and half the time what is there is sending you back out to space anyway, so you never really feel much connection to any physical place. The relative value of items is totally skewed because of the scale of ship related expenses compared to anything else, so what's the value of stealing a cool rock? It's also very difficult to tell relative weapon/item quality at a glance. I know that a steel sword is better than an iron sword; I have no clue why a Reflective Terrablazer is better than a Targeted Blurgun - and the default weapons usually don't matter anyway because I would much rather have cool modifiers. The stealth and lockpick mechanics are both behind skill tree unlocks, so you're far less likely to engage with those mechanics in the first place. The shops are all open 24/7 (I think? honestly don't even know) so the day/night cycle seems irrelevant, so sneaking in to the shop is a no go, and I feel pretty limited in lockpicks and don't really know where to reliably buy than a few at a time. And you never, ever, find anything surprising or compelling, and if you did it would be reduced to a quest checkbox.

So to summarize: I don't know who I'm stealing from, I don't know why I would care to steal anything, it's not obvious how stealthy anyway I am unless I skill into it, it's not worth using my lockpicks, I'll never be caught, and their door is always open. There's zero motivation to actually engage with the world in a way that makes it feel alive. But it's critical to note: all those systems are still there! You can do all this stuff in the game! But because of how things are structured, even though the game on a fundamental level is extremely similar, the way you interact with it is totally removed from the kind of emergent fun that makes exploring those worlds so fun. It's just a smooth path of monotony to the next thing. The systems often amount to less than the sum of their parts.

Now I'll admit, some of this could be on me. Maybe I've changed. It's possible. But man, I tried. Hey, what's that cool cave on this planet? I'll go check it out! Oh uhh, it's nothing? There's... a dead crab and a box with some old glue? Okay I guess?

I did actually enjoy starfield (it wasn't amazing or anything, but I don't regret my purchase), but I have to say, I hate this argument.

For one thing, being a Bethesda game doesn't just immediately grant a pass for being bad in all the ways Bethesda games are generally always bad (bugs, bad facial animations, outdated mechanics, etc). Each game should be judged for how good of a game it is, not how good a " Bethesda game" it is.

Secondly, and more importantly, the fact is that this time around is especially bad simply because all the typical "Bethesda" issues are just starting to become more and more egregious as time goes on. The fact is that if you handed me this game and told me that it was a heavily modded copy of FO4 I'd 100% believe you. Nothing in this game really shows a meaningful step forward either in tech or gameplay from what we've seen before. The only real "new" thing is ship to ship combat, which is frankly very lackluster.

As for what people expected? Better. That's pretty much the long and the short of it. They expected it to feel less clunky than FO4, they expected space travel mechanics that weren't just glorified fast travel menus, and new gameplay that doesn't just feel like the same shit Bethesda has been doing since Morrowind.

That being said, the worldbuilding is phenomenal, as is typical of Bethesda, and at least for me, that's where most of the fun came in, just wandering around and doing side quests to explore more of the world. But once you've more or less explored the world, there's not much left to draw you in. The gameplay itself certainly hasn't been fun enough to make me seriously consider a newgame+ any time soon.

Their biggest, most consistent fault isn't bugs orjank, it's the stale as fuck writing. They desperately need the hand the reigns to some new talent in that area.

It feels like they've been incapable of writing a compelling narrative with interesting characters for decades now.

More progress than “better at being a Bethesda game than Fo4”.

I was a die hard Bethesda fan prior to 76 and they need to do better than par to earn my favor back. They scorned me and my wallet isn’t going to forget that any time soon.

I don't think it's a bad game at all. But the Bethesda formula is definitely showing its age and the muted tone and presentation of Starfield, compared to Elder Scrolls and Fallout, accentuates this. I have like a dozen other games vying for my attention and a huge backlog of other titles, and I've been struggling to find motivation to play Starfield as a result. If I'd paid CDN$90 for the privilege I'd probably feel more strongly about it either way.

It doesn't have the same impact from the world design or story telling. It's generic. It's boring. It's bland. The game play is exactly the same, but the motivation to give a shit about anything is gone because nothing about the world is very interesting aside from the aesthetics.

Shit, man, even the books in the game are just excerpts from real books. Like... humans haven't written anything new in the 200 something years since Earth's exodus? Cmon.

What? The developer whose UI has been consistently shite from game to game, only for mods to come to the rescue, has released yet another obnoxious UI? Whose games are pretty much universally "great with mods", is meh right out the gate? Colour me shocked!

Funny, that's the exact mission that made me lose interest in the game as well. >!I hopped on that day for the base building and eventually ship building but I guess I had a stolen item on me and triggered the mission. I don't want to be forced to do this mission or pay the fine when all I wanted to do was play a different portion of the game that was available to me.!<

I play on medium settings. Some scenes look borderline photorealistic. Other scene and lighting combinations looks worse than 2005 Battlefront 2.

I've been playing on minimum graphics, and it looks much better than any previous Bethesda game. The performance isn't too great, and the TAA is a bit blurry, but it's tolerable.