Anon is disillusioned about Starfield

- I mean, I wouldn't put Starfield in the same family as Diablo IV, with most of the game behind a microtransaction wall. Bethesda promised Skyrim in Space. We got Skyrim in Space. Skyrim is a polarizing game (much like Witcher 3 is, often for opposite people/reasons).
  I don't think Starfield is "not so bad", I'm having the best gaming experience I've had in a year or two. I think all the critiques are valid, but I don't really care about most of them.
  So why should I play a game I don't enjoy to punish the makers of the game I do enjoy? I have a very limited amount of gaming time. It gets the game I'm having the most fun with.
  
  I feel like I'm in some sort of fugue state with everyone comparing this to Skyrim. In what way is this like Skyrim? Skyrim, for all its flaws, at least had hand crafted worlds with interesting things to see and do in them. From what I've seen of Starfield, that has been completely replaced by procedurally generated barren worlds. Like yeah, you can 'explore' them, but for what? What is there even to find?
  
  What part of Diablo 4 is behind a microtransaction wall? Some skins?
  The problem with both games is they disrespect the player's time by turning everything into a slog.
  That's way more of an issue with modern game design trying to maximize hours played while minimizing actual content than paid skins. Those may suck, but to be fair it was Bethesda who introduced the damn thing in the first place. I'd rather pretend the premium skins don't exist but have a fun game than have no microtransactions and a boring 150+ hours of empty world with a total of 35 hours of interesting beats.
- Oh maybe those who didn't like it far whatever reason accept that things are subjective and their experience is not universal. Plenty of people have enjoyed this game and found things to like even if it's not perfect. You don't like it, that's also a valid point of view, but you can't dictate to other people that they also shouldn't enjoy it.
  
  Plenty of people have enjoyed this game and found things to like even if it's not perfect.
  "People enjoy the slop so the slop must not be that bad."
  but you can't dictate to other people that they also shouldn't enjoy it.
  Yes but we can absolutely point out they're enjoying slop and are probably the biggest contribution to mainstream games becoming more and more soulless slop.
- what I find more wild is as usual the toxic gaming community can't handle opinions. I like the game, I don't care if others don't, but acting like I don't have "standards" cause you don't like it is rediculous. Likewise, I got bored so fast of baulders gate 3 but apparently it's the second coming of christ and I must be wrong. No, I get why people love it, it just wasn't my jam. Starfield is
- its so depressing that people still seethe this much over others liking a game they didnt

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.
- 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.
- God, I couldn't put my finger on why I didn't like it. I was just so bored, even with the exploration which I normally love. All of the fun parts of FO4 and Skyrim are missing. Just walking around and enjoying the world is completely missing, replaced by a pretty shitty space travel mechanic.
  Fast travel to space, then fast travel to another planet. Fast travel to the surface and bunny hop to an objective through a boring city/space station/whatever. Fast travel back to your ship and do it all over again. I never made it far in the story because I couldn't be bothered to give a damn. The characters were completely uninteresting at best. oh average they were mildly annoying.
  Let me take off from the planets surface and fly in to space a few times before you lock me in to fast traveling. Let me fly from space and scream in to the atmosphere, shooting over the surface looking for a safe place to land, and navigate my way in to the city. Maybe 90% of the surface is uninteresting, that's fine. But let me at least have some fun learning that.
  They made every safe choice, and lost the sense of adventure. Because adventures aren't supposed to be safe.
  
  Fast travel to space, then fast travel to another planet. Fast travel to the surface and bunny hop to an objective through a boring city/space station/whatever. Fast travel back to your ship and do it all over again.
  Loading Screens: The Game
  
  No Man's Sky has you covered, in all the ways Starfield doesn't.
  
  It makes me appreciate the tech in StarCitizen, pity it's just lacking a game.
- Aside from the writing, ship combat, and the voice acting, if you'd told me Starfield was a fan mod for Fallout 4 I would have believed you.
  
  Be fair to Fallout 4 mods, there's probably several with more interesting writing than Starfield.
- I thought I was going crazy. "haven't I been here before ??" I couldn't believe they actually copied and pasted entire areas several times over
  
  I mean technically they are copied infinitely due to proc gen. I just don't get why they didn't proc gen the POIs as well, would have at least made them more varied.

Lost interest in a few hours I was sad.
Great potential, horrible interface, wonky mechanics
- Same. 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.
  
  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?
  
  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’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.
  
  Not since Daggerfall, but been a big TES fan since falling in love with Morrowind. Each subsequent entry to the series has been more disappointing then the last, but Skyrim was decent enough that I still put a good chunk of hours into it. Now though, TES is basically a dead series to me. I'm not remotely interested in seeing where the series goes in modern Bethesda's hands. It will take overwhelming evidence that Bethesda has somehow changed for me to pick up TES 6.
  
  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.
  
  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'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.
- 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'm like 90% certain they planned on a method to travel between systems without jumping or fast traveling.
  He3 was supposed to be collected for jumping. However, if you run out near a planet that doesn't have any, it would be very difficult to get anywhere. It would also mean one of the very first things any user would have to do is set up an outpost for he3 or buy a lot of it from vendors.
  If there was a way to travel between planets and systems, even if it took a few minutes, new users could at least play around wherever they are and eventually set up an outpost to speed up the process. Maybe it would only be reasonable for planet-to-planet within the same system, but you would be able to find he3 somehow.
  Also, the whole thing with jumping to a new system. If your travel path includes another system that you haven't visited yet, you have to stop there first. It doesn't make much sense from a gameplay perspective unless they planned on having users actually travel it.
- I have never, and probably will never, play a Bethesda game. They're not my jam.
  Starfield has been rubbed in my eyes for months and months now. And it is apparently merely "okay."
  The biggest studios make the most mediocre crap, and I wish people would stop talking about them.
- I was turned off from the moment i saw at least most romance characters look 40-50 years old. Who the f wants those kinds of storylines with someone old enough to be their mom?
  
  Your dad, for one.
  
  Bold of you to assume everyone that plays is less than 30
  
  Who the f wants those kinds of storylines with someone old enough to be their mom
  Stop kink-shaming
  
  I'm in that age range, and I wouldn't want that type of storyline with a character who looks like a kid to me.

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.
- 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?"
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  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 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)
  
  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.
  
  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.

- You mean $10 for GOTY edition with all the bonus DLC so they can go ahead and rerelease the same thing but with "HD" graphics and another $70 pricetag
  
  Don't forget, the HD version will:
  Look worse than the game with graphical mods
  Break all existing mods
  But fear not! They'll just remove the original version from the store.
- I'm actually considering signing up for Xbox game pass, $3 for a month to play starfield. Feels like a fair trade

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.
- wrong game and wrong company
  
  You’re thinking of the new assassins creed

I intentially skipped all that hype on Starfield because I don't trust Bethesda, and it's starting to look like I was right.
- To the surprise of no.......I mean apparently a lot of people who should probably know better by now
  Can't wait to try it in 5 years
  
  This is my approach as well. I now always wait, sometimes years, before buying a game because I've been burned too many time buying day 1 releases or, even more horrifyingly, pre orders. My track record? Well, I preordered FO76 because I loved FO4 and foolishly expected a similar experience. $60 and 1 hour of game play later, I put it down and never touched it again. Also preordered CP2077... huge mistake. I didn't have a cutting edge computer but it was no slouch... ran like shit. Only played it a year after release. Also and worst of all, I preordered No Man's Sky. Like, what the fuck was that about? Loved it 2 years later tho. After CP2077, I vowed to never ever buy a game less than a year old. It's stupid to support shit bullshit behavior from these so called "AAA" companies. I had that term "AAA" anyways. It's just marketing speak for, more expensive than what it should ever be.

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.
- Shitty enough to survive 37 years in an industry that sees multiple studios shuttered every year.
  
  Shitty can still be successful.
  
  They literally live off hype then going quiet long enough for people to forget the disappointment. The older people remember and don't expect much, the middle aged people remember but are hopeful they'll be better (and that the older people are just jaded), and the younger people just fall for the hype.
  This is it, this is all Bethesda is now. Constantly recycling suckers through long dev cycles and hype.
  
  I mean, McDonald's is still around too. Doesn't mean it's quality food.
- 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"
- Morrowind erasure.
  
  Seriously, it was my first open world RPG and I've been chasing the dragon ever since
- Calling it now:
  DLC adds the Elder Scrolls planet. You travel there to pick up some lost artifact part and have to fight your way through dragons and vampires and shit. It's so easy that you decide to build an outpost and retire there.
  Elder Scrolls 6 starts off with an alien invader (Starfield you) stealing some ancient power which keeps evil at bay or whatever. You gain allies from the factions if you want and perform a heist from the evil alien thing. Fuck you, buy the game.
  
  A NEW HAND TOUCHES THE BEACON!!
  
  I mean it would be really funny.
  Like you're guarding one of the last untouched Elder Scrolls. An alarm goes off "some is breaking into the vault". You and your squad are the first to arrive just to see some oddly shaped humanoid flip you the bird as the weirdly foggy drawbridge closes.

Anon is not wrong.

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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  best RPG ever
  Disco Elysium would like a word.
- 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.

this is why I never buy Bethesda at release. Let the modders come, and perhaps Bethy will fix some shit themselves, you never know... give it six months or a year and you'll always have a better experience, and often cheaper and with more dlcs.
- This is why I never buy Bethesda games, if they can't be bothered to release an enjoyable game I won't bother rewarding them my money.
  It's not 2002 anymore, there are too many quality games coming out every year to play them all, why do people keep that company alive?
  
  Someone fixed their shitty UI for free on day one. I'm not surprised at all why they don't even bother to fix their shit.
  
  I derived plenty of enjoyment with Fallout 4, Skyrim, FNV (not exactly a bethesda title but one that also shipped with tons of bugs).... at around $40 each, with all their DLC stuff, I think they're great values. Just not worth the new release jazz.
- Read that as more dics. Probably those too.
  
  there's so many mods for that.
- Fallout 4 is the Fallout game I enjoyed most even tho it's clearly not even top 3 of the series. Reason? So many mods that make the game better. I'm essentially not playing FO4, I'm playing Sim Settlements and, oh yeah, my son is missing or some shit.
- Just don't bide your time too long, if you're too late they'll start re-releasing it for the next 15 years on every platform imagineable and for full price each time. There was a sweet spot with Skyrim on PC where you got upgraded to the ultimate edition (or whatever tf) for free if you bought the game before the transition.

I suppose the money you're spending on marketing is money you're not spending on the game
- coding is hard, esp. across large teams
  marketing is easy. shillbots are cheap and more effective than ever now that GPT is a thing, and then there is "50 cent army" or mechanical turk options if you want a more human option

Meanwhile, BG3 launches and shows what a proper RPG is capable of.
- Very different design philosophies. Bethesda try to create dynamic worlds to explore where every npc has a schedule they follow over the course of the day and you find new things organically, but end up not having the resources to create much depth in their quests.
  Larian put a lot of work into their quests, but have a very static world where there is no day/night cycle and npcs repeat the same path and barks every few minutes.
  
  every npc has a schedule they follow over the course of the day
  except they don't in Starfield
  find new things organically
  I mean maybe you can argue you can still do this but it's less "stumble on ancient tomb" and more "click on a interesting looking marker on the map"
  
  npcs repeat the same path and barks every few minutes.
  Man you really haven't played a Bethesda game since Skyrim

The thing about word walls is it's simple and it just works. You suck the ancient text, behold the epic fanfare and leave. Temples, on the other hand, make for a great spectacle the first time you experience it. Then you realize you have to do the same ritual again and again.
- Feel like they should've shortened them after the first one or two times you do it, so you only have to collect two of the things. Explain it as your connection to the temples growing as you gain their power or something, or even just don't explain it at all.
  
  They should have just left out the minigame, would have been more interesting to walk into a room with this giant ring hovering there.

Elder Scrolls VI: Spacerim
- STARRING: “Sarah Morgan Disliked That.”
  
  Featuring "sort through all that stuff, only take the important things!"
- Elder Fall Field
  
  Uniroically would be more interesting. Just a giant field, with some holes in it. Let the old folks loose. HOURS of entertainment.

I really hate essential NPCs
Especially in Skyrim when half the side quest characters are also unkillable 😒

- New Vegas was basically a fan mod, Bethesda only provided the engine. Just like a mod
  
  Is the gameplay the appeal of New Vegas? It’s my favourite of the Fallout franchise because I like the writing, and also I can kill almost anyone but somehow the story will find a way to go forward.
  God I would kill (every NPC) for an Obsidian-made Skyrim.

I like the game. Shipbuilding, base building, and exploring settlements is pretty fun.

60 hours in, either I'm playing it or thinking about it. Hell, I'm taking a break from just wiping out the Crimson Fleet to post this.
Yeah yeah puddle deep and all but I like Bethesda RPGs, there isn't anyone else making sandbox RPGs to compare to and it runs good enough on Xbox. My PC was never gonna play it well.
No matter how much you hate it tho you have to admit the dialog system is the best of the atudios' games by far. There are so many Persuade options and the mini game for it is done well enough. So many skills and traits get brought up in dialog like stealth, security, wanted, faction, etc. It's like an upgrade on New Vegas's system. Combat is great too and impactful . Hell I shot a guy in the shoulder and he grabbed it and yelled "OW HE HIT ME IN THE SHOULDER!" which surprised me. Space combat is fun too.
Wish UI and inventory management was better. Wish I could fly off the beaten path and find shit outside the "space box" you warp into. But whatever, once I realized it's Fallout, not Freelancer I adjusted accordingly. Games better than the haters make it out to be, and that's without any mods.
- It’s a shame you’re being so heavily downvoted for simply having your own opinion. I actually agree with you. It’s certainly not GOTY material but it’s also not a bad game.
  Especially given the modding tools that will be coming. It seems quite a few people don’t wish to give credit to Bethesda for this feature yet there are single digit AAA developers that release tools. And I can’t think of any other developers, perhaps bar Valve, that offer such a great modding experience.
  It’s not about “fixing the game” (although that has proven to be one benefit over the years); it’s about enabling players to add to the world, make their mark, and share it with anyone. And Starfield feels like a marvellous playground with a firm foundation that will afford countless developers and gamers to build upon it. Heck, the mods that are already out are awesome. I’m thankful that Bethesda still puts in the effort for PC gamers to have that opportunity.
  What I’ve enjoyed most about the game so far was actually messing around and restarting a few times with different builds and a seeing how things change.
  There’s a lot of stuff hidden from the player if you don’t have the skill or the right level or whatever but, oh man have I been enjoying the dialogue. I went all in on all the social stuff and it’s honestly been a really great ride for someone like me that loves space and loves getting to know characters.
  This is certainly the first Bethesda game (ignoring New Vegas since they didn’t make that masterpiece) where characters are interesting, have back stories, and feel fleshed out / developed (especially over time).
  Morrowind, while with deeper conversation options, felt like everyone was basically the same person and the reuse of dialogue between NPCs was a bit of a let down. Oblivion and Skyrim felt like there were only 5 people in the entire game (the same voice actors everywhere didn’t help). The Fallouts were better but still shallow or too brief.
  The Constellation NPCs l, for instance, have been really interesting to get to know over the game; there’s so much dialogue for every quest, I kind of wish I could take more of them on a mission than just one, especially how you can often let them talk in a conversation with another NPC rather than just sit around while you do everything. I’m not doing “romance” as that’s not something I’m into role playing but it certainly feels like I’ve some interesting friends coming along for the ride.
  Alas, Bethesda can’t win when their audience is basically “all gamers” and there will always be a lot of people who aren’t satisfied - and that’s totally fine. Thankfully there’s plenty of amazing games out right now that there’s no need to waste energy complaining about Starfield.
  As I pitched to my patient gamer friends: Starfield isn’t Elite, Star Citizen, or No Man’s Sky. It’s a Bethesda game that launches with jank, has plenty of good moments and bad, but (given a few years) will be one of the richest gaming playgrounds like all of the Bethesda games before it (and I’m guessing it’ll be possibly the richest of them all).
  I wonder if someone will make Starwind where you can land on planet Nirn? Haha.
  
  I'm playing a social character too and it's so damn viable for a Bethesda game I'm impressed. I've talked my way out of so many situations and if you get the Ryujin chip you can Jedi Mind Trick others too.
- A lot of people forget that there's different kinds of RPGs. Or just games in general. To them, every RPG has to be Baldurs Gate 3 now. Just like previously, every open world now had to be Elden Ring or else it sucks. Sandbox RPG? Never heard of it. Like, can you fuck off to the wilderness and start producing drugs in BG3? Can you build a spaceship that looks like a massive cock? That's the sort of freedom you get in a Bethesda RPG, where doing random shit in the world is a viable way to play. Are you gonna finish the main story by making drugs? No, but you're gonna level up and make money.
  I think Bethesda games are like the remnants of a genre that has become rarer and rarer. I mean, how many games released these days are actual sandboxes, and not just regular open world games pretending to be sandboxes? Zelda is one that comes to mind, but not really many more outside of Bethesda. Sandbox games are a dying breed in the AAA space, and for some reason some people really just want to deliver the killing blow to it.
- Totally. People are too busy noticing the bigger issues and completely skip over the good aspects. They are there, else I'd not keep playing it for so many hours. It's sad that we can't talk positive about the game without getting hated at.
  It's the same as it was with Cyberpunk2077, I could play it really well on my then new PC with little bugs. Even when you named the positive things, no one was listening. It was an amazing game then, I wonder how it's with DLC and 2.0 update, which I've yet to play.
  That said. There are a ton of bugs in Starfield and if that's what values most to you, then it's justified to not like the game.
  
  Yep about Cyberpunk as well. I played on XSX where it was already 60fps and I played it like a Immersive Sim instead of a GTA RPG and enjoyed the hell outta it.
- There are so many Persuade options and the mini game for it is done well enough
  ...what?
  There's flavor text options I guess but NPCs don't even acknowledge what you say. They always respond with a canned "I didn't think about it that way", or "oh, interesting"
  The "minigame" is just rolling three dice instead of one dice roll like in the past.
  
  Which is an improvement over Fallout 4 and Skyrim.
  Name a better way without invoking ChatGPT Go:

I completely no life’d Starfield on PC until Phantom Liberty came out…now my modded Cyberpunk new play through…I haven’t touched Starfield since.
Likely I’ll pick it up again when creation kit comes out in ‘24 and significant mods make the game what we were expecting (dismemberment, more mature themes, potential enhanced space travel etc)
- I liked cyberpunk but all the endings were fucking depressing (at least all the ones i got)
  Havent gotten the dlc yet bought lies of p instead
  
  Had my eyes on lies of P, how is it?
  
  So I’ve heard.apparently phantom liberty adds a new base game ending if you play your cards right but I haven’t even gotten dogtown offered to me in my play though yet
  
  That's the whole point of cyberpunk, everything sucks, you never win.
  
  Sometimes a game's world is fucked, and that is fine. gestures wildly at all of SoulsBorne

The combat's fun, shooting spacers hasn't gotten old yet, but otherwise, yup, very average.
- I would rather shoot anything in Cyberpunk. The gunplay is way better. I can slide around and I can hack people on top of shooting them in the head which operates realistically. Starfield? Enjoy your Orion and sponge bullet enemies with zero dismemberment.

lotting is worse and all randomized
What does that even mean?
- Looting* is my guess
  
  Yes that makes sense. I played Starfield for a bit and looting was pretty terrible.
- I think they mean "looting."
- I don't know about worse, but it's definitely randomized a lot. There's no intent

space shouts ? I've played about 25hrs (it's become very, very repetitive in the last 5) but I don't know what this is about. Is it a new mechanic that reveals itself at some point during the game ?
- Do the main quest for a while, it is not missable I think.
  
  It's true that I haven't progressed in it a lot
- Yes. Do the main quest "Into the Unknown". I was 80 hours in when I discovered that you get powers.
- I think anon is talking about the artifact pieces.

This post tracks with the reviews I saw

Anon plays star citizen

That honestly makes me happy that it isn't a must play. My PC is getting too long in the tooth for a game like Starfield and I don't have an Xbox. But I'm a big Bethesda fan and felt like I was missing out.
I wanted NMS with a more compelling narrative and RPG components and it doesn't look like Starfield is that.
- Tbh, you could probably still play this; the steam deck can play it.
  That being said, I don't recommend you play it.
  
  I am right above the minimum requirements, but just barely. If anything, playing it would probably make me want to upgrade my PC.

american capitalism turns anything good into shit.
have a good game? let EA ruin it.
wait until you find out how shit coca cola is. go use corn to make sugar. die young or subscription pay for health until you die fat and unhappy.
...there is really nothing left to like about the american dream.
2024 will be eyeopening. what is it if you want two old fucks fight for presidency? necrophelia? EA will ruin ten more game studios, netflix/amazon will show ads ads ads in every subscribtion and house costs will make sleeping under a bridge a 5 star airbnb experience...
starfield ia just one result of a fucked up culture
- The fuck I just read? You seem upset, but I'm honestly not sure if it's about high fructose corn syrup, netflix, airbnb, necrophilia or possibly necrophilia involving the president...
  You need to put down the keyboard, stop using whatever stimulant you're on and take a long nap. Then you come back here and reread that diatribe and, for the love of all that's good in the world, please try to translate it into coherent English.
  
  Yeah wtf is this guy mad about?
  high fructose corn syrup, netflix, airbnb, necrophilia or possibly necrophilia involving the president...
  That sounds like a good time to me!
- Spot on, and I'm not even American, but were are all affected by this.
  My solution since 5 years ago is to embrace open source, embrace indie games, embrace organic food, indpendent products/producers, etc.
  I've been saving quite some money and I have never been healthier physical or mentally wise
- don't make this an american thing, ain't like the chinese aren't making knock off bullshit all the time, or the saudis aren't buying up everything they can.
- Get some help dude, so much anger and frustration isn't healthy

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/382/534/298.gif

Someone should make a mod called "Todd's slop"
- They did: it's the base game.

It just slops.

After Fallout 4 I kind of figured this is the direction starfield was going. I love Skyrim, but I just haven't been able to enjoy a Bethesda game since then. They don't have the magic, and the mechanics are even more half assed than Skyrim.
Idk, this shit just isn't acceptable after Witcher 3 came out.
- Why do people worship game studios? Successful game studios always get big, go corporate, and then the talent and creativity leaves.
  Witcher was good because it wasn't made by Bioware, Mythic, Bethesda, or any of these brand name studios. CD Project Red will come to suck one day, too. As is the cycle of game studios.
  
  Sad but true

Stop buying Bethesda products! Skyrim was their swan song!

I think Star feels a good game, but you have to approach it like a bethesda game, they've lately been doing pretty good looter shooters with some RPG story elements. But they're not RPGs, but they market themselves as the next greatest RPG, and I think that's disillusioning a lot of people.
If you approach it as a looter shooter, take a breezy, it's pretty fun

Modders will fix it!
It's not moddable on gamepass, so I doubt I'll ever care.
- Its modable on gamepass. One of the things bethesda did with starfield is allow loading of mods through the default save location (my games folder) instead of having to directly install mods in the game folder. This applies to mods that dont affect the game executable.
  
  Had no idea. I just assumed it was Xbox's weird format. Thanks for the information.
- If you mean Xbox, Bethesda already said Xbox will support mods like how Fallout and Skyrim did. So you'll be limited to the "store" but it'll have mods
- What are you talking about? I'm playing the gamepass version with several mods installed

this guy is acting like you cant just tell constellation to fuck off and never return there and go back to being a miner 😂 albeit freelance miner on your own but still

I gave up on it after an hour. Oh woooooooow being foreshadowed I'm gonna fight this giant thing that just ruined the whole thing, super suspenseful anyway byyyyye. Frankly I just can't get into it - the environments, graphics, gunplay, enemies etc. are terribly dull. I need something to be different than in Skyrim almost 12 years ago.
- How you can even pretend to have an informed opinion after a single hour of gameplay is beyond me.
  You wouldn't even have made it past the tutorial intro by that time, let alone know the gameplay loop or factions available.
  Bet you didn't do any ship building, acquired powers, or did a single side-quest.
  Some people really want to complain about everything, don't they?
  
  There's a real unfortunate tendency these days of people solidifying their love/hatred of something as part of their identity and then never move from that position. We've seen it with Star Wars, Trek, etc, both came back weak and improved but some people won't budge from the opinion formed in those initial releases. Same here, some people have decided they hate ~~Bioware~~Bethesda/MS and therefore this game must be bad.
  
  Cool, my opinion is uninformed, then. If you like the game, great, good, terrific. I didn't. It's not an attack on you personally. Calm down.
  
  A game shouldnt take multiple hours for you to decide if you’re going to like it. Hell a tutorial shouldnt take an hour to complete. Someone getting home from work isint going to enjoy starting up a new game thats not fun for the first several hours which would take up most of their evening or several evenings
- It's worse than Skyrim. Skyrim is at least fun to look at and explore.
  
  Frankly this is my takeaway too. Someone said "it's Fallout but without any style" (paraphrased) and that seems about right.
  
  I was never a fan of the Bethesda jank and look, but skyrim was at least interesting. It was pretty funny to just see what npc's are up to and just doing random things. I don't think it's as great as people make it out to be. But starfield has nothing going on.
- What giant thing? You don't even know what the game is about.

I can't stop laughing at these dopamine addicted coke rats who can't keep their grubby paws off the latest bibeo gaem.
Just have one oz (29.6mL) of self control and don't preorder it. Wait for the reviews to drop. Do some market research and be an informed consumer.

This is so polarizing. I had no doubts it would be shit, it's Bethesda. But it's actually not that bad. But some just say the exact opposite. The game mechanics are all completely schizophrenic at best, but it's not a surprise, at any point does it deviate from classic Bethesda logic. Staring dudes and badly scaled rpg systems. It's just par for course but more modern. And why people think quick travel is a bad thing, when it's been a staple since like 97 or something, is just completely beyond me.
- Lets start from your statement - it is shit. And people paid 70$ for it. No need to go further. Their voices deserve to be heard (since, you know, 70$). And now you say that they shouldn't have believed the hype as if they are wrong and not the people that overpromised and (not underdelivered but) lied.
  
  not the people that overpromised and (not underdelivered but) lied.
  Who lied here?

That “Chosen one” part makes me feel confused. If you’re a gamer most likely you have been a loser your entire life, so being the “chosen one” for once should make you feel great… no?
If you just want to be a loser in games just go play Sims 4
- They sell their games like: do whatever you want, be whoever you wanna be.
  As long as you want to be the chosen one who collects trinkets.
  
  You don't even have to do the main story, you can literally fuck off after Barret gives you his ship.
  You don't need to be the chosen one, just a fucker who started hallucinating after touching a weird metal that they now keep in storage as a memento trinket.
  
  I have about 70 hours in the game and haven't touched the main quest besides the first few. There's so many quest lines and side content that if I never did the main quest I'd be satisfied with my purchase.
- I think it's the inherent tension between a game that promises an immersive, open, and explorable world with a powerful character creator, and AAA studio's overwhelming compulsion to create a cinematic main quest line.
  The two goals are directly at odds. And it leads to a situation where no matter what kind of character you create, you are still the same predefined character. Because the developers need a common touchpoint to write a story around.
  It's an issue with a lot of games. In Skyrim, no matter what character you make, you are still the Dragonborn, you can roll a Khajiit and still be able to waltz into every city, even as the other Khajiit are restricted to outside the walls. Similarly in Mass Effect, you will always be Shepard. My excitement for Cyberpunk evaporated when I saw that it was leaning into a cinematic experience rather than a cyberpunk one.
  
  It's actually not an issue in Starfield, people just don't have a clue about the game. Everyone that touches one of the artifacts for the first time gets the vision and can get the temple power. There's an entire quest where you go to a temple with Barrett and get him a power as well. When you talk to the Emissary and the Hunter, it's revealed that you die in quite a lot of the other universes. You're not the chosen one in any capacity, you're just a random person, there's nothing special about you.
  The main quest also gives you literally zero urgency to complete it. The fate of the universe isn't at stake, no great threat is looming that requires you to collect them (at least not until way later and even then not really), they're just a mystery that a group of scientists and explorers is investigating.

- No, multiple of the core skill trees are flat out broken.
  You can invest skill points in outpost building, only to eventually realize that they give you no way of even building flat ground.
  You can invest skill points in stealth, only to eventually realize that the stealth mechanics are either utterly bugged out and broken, or if working as intended, were designed by a sadist who hates stealth games.
  You can invest skill points in unarmed combat, only to very quickly realize that there is flat out no quick way of going unarmed.
  And through these and several other broken skill tree paths, you can learn that there is never any way to respec and you're stuck having wasted skill points in cool sounding stuff that is actually useless. There are aspects of this game that are fundamentally broken.
- Starfield isn't even mid, it's abyssmal. The sheer embarrassment of the fact that they spent hundreds of millions of dollars making it should make them reconsider their career and life choice.
  
  If it was actually abysmal, then it wouldn't be enjoyed by so many people.
  Stop pretending like your opinion is universal, because it clearly isn't.
- Breaking news: rando on the internet plays a game for the first time in his life.
- "Starfield is a good game"
  No. No it isn't. It has worse space exploration than a game from 2016(NMS), worse inventory management than Minecraft, and an unnecessary amount of loading screens that haven't been seen since Borderlands 1.
  
  I hate defering to review scores, but most reviews agree despite some issues it is a pretty good game. Everyone I know who's played it in real life is enjoying it despite the issues. I'm not saying you enjoyed it as you clearly didn't, but your experience clearly isn't universal.
- I didn't listen to the hype either, and was sucked in for like 70 hours, but knowing that >!the universe I'm in is gonna cease to exist as part of the main storyline!< makes it impossible for me to care about any of it. Why would I >!try to finish a side mission or make an outpost or build a ship if it's all gonna be wiped away in a few hours? Why would I finish the game if it means wiping all of that away?!< Why would I play the game if I want to not finish it? There's a fundamental disconnect there that kills my motivation to play
  
  I noticed that while I was playing, before discovering how the game "ends," that I was at least keeping myself occupied, if I wasn't even really having all that much fun. Mostly, I was idly ticking boxes.
  Once I learned about the end game, all motivation to play disappeared. Why waste my time ship building, outpost building, doing anything at all if I'm just going to have to start over? But I can't even change my skill points, so I'm stuck with ever-increasing amounts of XP just to get new skills.
  Bad game design, overall it's at best a 6/10.
  
  So you mean to say why should you enjoy the journey if you don't like the supposed end?