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doublepepperoni [none/use name] @hexbear.net

So did Starfield become the next big thing?

It feels like when Fallout 3, 4 and Skyrim came out you couldn't escape people posting about them for weeks, especially with Skyrim. Now the most I've seen are complaints about how disappointing Starfield was.

Is the game that much blander or does Internet culture just move on that much faster these days? On the other hand, I do feel like there was a lot more enthusiasm for other games like Elden Ring, and sometimes you get an Among Us that just completely take over the Internet.

131 comments

  • I think the Bethesda cycle has gone a lot faster this time around with people more or less turning on it within a month releasing long more thought out reviews than the first wave of day 1 stuff. BG3 coming out and astounding everyone immediately prior also happened to just make it the easiest thing to compare it to and unfortunately for Starfield, BG3 is a fucking masterpiece. Starfield has some interesting ideas and some interesting stuff in it, but it's just so hampered by poor design choices and a lifeless world that it didn't hit it for people.

    In the probably dozen videos discussing it about a month after release, it's almost universally compared to BG3, nobody thinks about Elden Ring to compare it to, and I feel like it's for Starfield's benefit in that regard. Elden Ring did a substantially better more interesting world to explore than anything Bethesda's released in years. On top of that, this is probably Bethesda's weakest world, people that were pretty into the Bethesda formula find Starfield more difficult to really click with because the worlds are barren and there's so much homogenous slop. The other day I was looking at the steam front page and wasn't particularly surprised to see Starfield at like the 15th top selling game on steam at the time with BG3 sitting at the top still. Starfield was losing to Skyrim in sales according to steam's front page.

    Bethesda burned through pretty much all the nostalgia and good will at this point, FO76, premium mods, the lackluster FO4 after New Vegas. That weird elder scrolls mobile game they released that everyone seems to have forgotten about. The gajillion re-releases of Skyrim. These other titles had the benefit of long franchise power and fans being established from the better titles and finding parts they could enjoy or how the lore has been expanded. Recently I watched some Fallout lore videos and they've certainly taken it places with the tabletop and 76 additions. Like they've just fully embraced adding lovecraftian ancient ones to the universe with the tabletop more or less confirming that there's an ancient God behind the church of Atom. There's also stuff about the mothman cult secretly being a front for worshipping some other tentacled creature. People are going to dig through this stuff much more because they basically write the stories after Bethesda throws shit around. In my time playing Starfield, I found the clean corpo UC and the space cowboys of the FC. There were references to a war between them that had since ended and that was about it. I looked around a bit for more lore but found basically nothing.

    My time in Starfield ended up being mostly momentum after forcing myself to see it through for a few hours which at that point I kept going for inertia and time sunk. I wanted only a few things. To fly a cool spaceship, to build a cool base, and to shoot cool guns. None of that happened. I didn't give a shit about the main plot and immediately ditched it the first chance I could.

    With the spaceship part I did a bunch of side content looking to make money to finance a cool ship only to realize I needed to stat dump into piloting to get the best parts, which took a few hours of grinding to get to because level gates suck and destroying 30 ships takes a long fucking time. I had made a few others in the meantime and realized just how bland it really was. I was expecting a honeycomb style ship when I made my first wide ship, but the game just arbitrarily decides where doors will be placed, so have fun with that connecting hallway being a dead end and your ship snaking you around for a while. Eventually grabbed a mod that gave me all the ship parts at a single vendor and built the best ship I could and by then I couldn't stand the remnants of the lego-style connections standing out with the ship being unsleek and looking patched together at best.

    Building a base and guns I didn't even get to start. I spent at least 20 hours grinding for resources and fighting against the game's inventory system trying to build up some mining outposts to get me the raw resources to then build a base. But I was also trying to do gun modding which ate all my resources. Resources weigh an ungodly amount and even after patching in a mod that would remove the weight while I carried them and cheating my carry weight up like 4x, I still spent ages in the inventory menu trying to balance stuff while never having the right stuff because there are so many resources to juggle that get siphoned up by everything. After a while I was literally just playing to get these parts and I just never opened it again preferring to just open stellaris and play with gigastructural engineering.

    My favorite part of FO4 was the basebuilding paired with Sim Settlements. I dumped a few hundred hours on that alone. The gameplay loop was fun, I'd go out and with a mod that removed junk weight, would pick locations clean to then build homes for people.

    The big complaints I've seen with Starfield are that it's a dead feeling world, the NPCs are boring, the NPCs are super rude, the essential tag is abused, they even just have certain NPCs unable to even get damaged by the player. Like why can't I even hurt the jackass in Neon that's murdering people in the name of profit? Why is the board of the resort planet essential where I have to either enslave or drive off a colony ship that left Earth hundreds of years prior. Other complaints are about the abysmal story making itself meaningless in the process.

    There were interesting ideas but Bethesda is a fundamentally unambitious uncreative company at this point. The power system they lifted from FTL is interesting, but in the middle of a fight you're really not going to fiddle much with it. The shipbuilding is close to being good but is limited. Basebuilding is a step back from FO4. Carry limits are more obnoxious than ever. NPC animations are back to Oblivion. James Stephanie Sterling commented that they liked the one character that was meant to be annoying because they had character that the rest of the cast did not. The animations are in the uncanny valley for me and they all seem to love puckering their lips when they talk.

    NASApunk is also just a boring aesthetic

  • The 12 hours tutorial might be off-putting for people who aren't Bethesda pay piggies

    • Also, this might just be me but the game just looks so incredibly bland and drab, no flair or personality whatsoever

      • Yeah. Nasapunk is an incredibly generic aesthetic. The factions are all different flavors of liberal so there's nothing really interesting about them. The constant loading screens break up the exploration people loved in Skyrim and previous games. There's a dearth of hand-crafted stuff to find. It's all very bland, generic, and stripped down from prior games. Really embarassing, but Cash Rules Everything Around Me.

      • Apparently Todd called it "Skyrim in space" before launch, so

        a) people are waiting for modders to fix all the issues, or

        b) people finally got tired of the shallowest storylines ever, which leads to

        c) people are waiting for modders to add stories worth playing

  • Is the game that much blander or does Internet culture just move on that much faster these days?

    I haven't seen a shortage of BG3 memes, so I'm going to assume this is a Skills Issue on behalf of Bethesda Studios.

  • A couple of buddies of mine play it and every time they tell me or show me something about it I'm just like....alright. I think it's just an incredibly mid game.

  • No. I've not seen anyone even really talk about it, except to shit-talk it. I've seen people comparing it unfavorably to Cyberpunk 2077, and you know what? Yeah. CP2077 has a ton of issues but it looks good and the combat is actually fun and exciting. Starfield looks like crap. Not just technically, the visual design is incredibly bland, and there's literally nothing about the boring, empty setting they've created that is compelling or even original. They steal the inciting incident from Mass Effect and make it more boring. They undercut themselves everywhere by not allowing you to get into a ship, take off, and fly to another planet and land on it.

    It's just so fucking bland and I've seen nobody have anything good to say on it.

  • I think less people were interested in it in the first place. Bethesda squandered a ton of goodwill with the shameless cash-grabbing in Fallout 76, and the new IP looked incredibly tepid.

  • The little I've seen and the lot I've heard make it seem like the game is just bad. The only video I remember is someone doing a mass shooting where only a few of the npcs reacted slowly. The streamers I watched played it for like one day because they got sponsored before going back to whatever else they were playing, which for one was a third playthrough of Bg3 before playing Cyberpunk.

    The top streamers for it are in ~250 range lol, I have no interest in even pirating it and cannot imagine I ever will.

    • I have no interest in even pirating it

      The cruelest thing you could say.

    • A guy I follow on youtube is pretty into TES, he made a 150 episodes playthrough of Skyrim using Legacy of the Dragonborn, also played the Bethesda Fallout games, he played Starfield for 16 episodes before just giving up out of boredom and doing a cyberpunk playthrough now lol

  • I don't pay attention to Bethesda games and outside of the first week all I see are stories about how fucking shitty it runs on even top of line hardware. I'm sure the Bethesda super fans are going all

    over it but I'm blissfully unaware.

  • I haven't played in a couple weeks.

    I booted up skyrim on a 360 and i was reminded why people never stopped playing.

    Starfield was satisfying in a lot of respects, but the inability to do real exploration and just stumble on things really killed it imo.

    • All they had to do was copy a solar system from No Man's Sky and randomly place down their handcrafted locations and plot beats but no. Don't fly from planet to planet. He'll don't even enter or exit your ship. Teleport everywhere with loading screens, that's fun!!!

      • In playing, I make a point to at least get in my ship, settle my inventory, then take off from the planet first, it adds a decent amount of immersion over fast traveling planet to planet. For whatever reason autism had for me, something that really gets me excited is a vehicle big enough to walk around in. So I'm not skipping my favorite part.

131 comments