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It does get a lot of shit and I agree Bethesda is lacking in some creativity departments… but I’d still rate it a solid 6.5-7
I put about 80 hours into it. Enjoyed some aspects, disliked others. It’s just HEAVILY mid in my opinion. Worth a playthrough if you like Bethesda rpgs
6.5/7 is fine if you’re not paying $70 for the base game. It might be worth it now the costs have come down, but paying a premium price for a mid game justifies some of the shit people gave it.
That said, I played on Game Pass, big fan of the genre, and could only make it a few hours in. Just wasn’t for me. But then I really enjoyed The Outer Worlds and people shit on that too.
How does it compare to Outer Worlds? I found myself really bored in that game pretty often and I’m a huge Fallout fan so it surprised me how bland it all felt 90% of the time.
It’s really weird how many people stop “a few hours in”. Modern Bethesda games are notoriously slow-starts. A few hours in is still “training wheels” for the game.
I’m not saying you should go back to it, but how did you know it’s not for you that quickly?
As for Outer Worlds. I enjoyed it for what it was, but I’m of the fringe view that it doesn’t hold a candle to Starfield. It has more style, but less substance than Starfield IMO.
I feel like that hasn’t been true since Oblivion. Skyrim has you getting dragon powers a few hours in. Fallout gives you a gun and you’re blasting stuff right off the bat.
It’s those earlier games that force you to slow down. Morrowind for example gives you cave outside the first town that will almost certainly kill you if you go in.
Pretty much. In Starfield, the game gives you a ship that can reach about 75% of the star systems, and you can literally just start finding/stealing ships to cross the entire galaxy at the 1hr mark. If you know where you’re going, Starfield gets you in the action blazingly fast. If you don’t, well, that’s why they all (newer ones) hold your hand in the main story.
Nope, The Terminator came first… And I don’t think that’s THE first game, either.
I only knew this because I did some research out of confusion. See, when I grew up I had a game by a company called “Bethsoft”, and I vaguely remember it being a joust clone (though I could be confusing two things). I remembered it real well because I was 9 years old and their logo was a “tastefully” topless fairy. And you know what “tasteful” means to a 9 year old boy lol
Edit, looks like their very first game was Gridiron!
Right. Arena has a special place in my heart. Never got close to beating it, but played hundreds of hours anyway. I wasn’t very good at finishing games at that age lol.
Daggerfall was a dramatically better experience IMO. Never beat that one either, but I played it more than Arena. If I recall, that one was the one where just chilling out and questing could cause the main quest to timeout.
For me, it was a lot of small moments that added up quickly. (By a few hours, I gave it at least 10 or so). One big one was I’d chosen the talent where you get a house on a planet but with a mortgage. I thought this would be a cool way to give me an economic incentive to explore more etc.
I get to New Atlantis and follow the quest for this and I find out the ‘mortgage’ has no penalties, isn’t paid in installments, and can only be purchased in a lump-sum. So, it was a talent that gave me the ability to purchase a house and be able to essentially rent it on a per day basis until the full amount was paid. When I finally do get there the house is empty, and not all that fun to be in. No special quests etc tied to it.
Another moment that soured it for me, and this is a minor quibble but again they added up, was visiting The Eye for the first time. There was this big pile of trash in a corridor used as the block to the door to prevent further exploration. It just entirely took me out of my immersion in what should have been an epic moment. So much so I actually took a screenshot of it at the time.
A lot of folks are likely happy to look past those things but they all added up + reviews from folks further along in the story and gameplay giving a bad impression made me move onto something new. Super happy other folks were able to find enjoyment, just wasn’t for me.
I also didn’t resonate with any of the companions to a degree where I found them actively annoying to be around. I know some would say ‘just don’t loot’ but their constant calling out people who like to loot was annoying too.
Whereas with Outer Worlds I immediately loved Pravati (and most of the other companions too). Starfield I felt like I was talking to puppets only there because I was playing the game. Outer Worlds I felt a connection to their stories as much as my own.
That said, many systems in Outer Worlds were underdeveloped and parts of the game felt empty. It was a game of high highs but also low lows. It did make me excited for the sequel to build on that foundation though.
Genuinely curious, but what systems did you feel added more substance to Starfield? Dialogue choices and completing quests in various ways really made Outer Worlds shine for me, particularly in the DLCs.
When I finally do get there the house is empty, and not all that fun to be in. No special quests etc tied to it.
I can see the value in tying a few quests to it. So is your preference that they gutted the background system entirely? Other than the parents, there’s very little unique content tied to them. They’re just “flavor”.
was visiting The Eye for the first time. There was this big pile of trash in a corridor used as the block to the door to prevent further exploration
Honestly, this feels like DLC-bait to me. I can see why you’d want to “repair the eye to full working order” and maybe we will see that in the future. But for reference, there’s notes that imply the rest of the Eye is fully depressurized and needs to be repaired but time and money don’t allow for it.
reviews from folks further along in the story and gameplay giving a bad impression made me move onto something new
This is what I think is happening with most people. They see reviews and they sour of an otherwise great game. I saw this happen with the Wheel of Time show as well.
I also didn’t resonate with any of the companions to a degree where I found them actively annoying to be around. I know some would say ‘just don’t loot’ but their constant calling out people who like to loot was annoying too.
This is a common Bethesda thing. If you want to be as thief, the list of companions that are ok with you stealing from everybody is fairly slim.
but what systems did you feel added more substance to Starfield
For me… to start, I’m a tES lifer. Most of what I like is the things tES does consistently. Grand-Theft-Spaceship. Low consequences. Decente stories for each faction. A good main plotline. Neat mechanics to play with, a few more than you really need. I enjoyed making ships and bases, playing around with powers.
Wide-not-deep is the Bethesda manifesto, but it works for the right gamers.
I just have a hard time committing so much time for the chance for something to get good. Same for anything else. People keep telling me to watch one piece, sorry not going to invest time in something I am actively not enjoying until it gets good X hours in. That’s not getting good, it’s Stockholm syndrome.
I disagree. A lot of epic tales grab you in the opening. In fact that’s a bit of a cornerstone of writing, grab them early. If there’s nothing for me to like in the first two hours of something, why should I assume it’s going to get better?
I haven’t read those books, but is there really nothing interesting in them in the first few chapters? No breaks from the norm, nothing to grab you and keep you invested? Tbf epic fantasy, yeah, not my genre but it seems so foreign to me, having it be THAT slow of a burn.
The first book (about 900 pages if I recall) is largely an homage to Tolkien with the slow meandering journey punctuated only by a few action sequences. There’s a few incredible beats (surprise, Wheel of Time is my favorite literature and I’ve read the 14-book series 6-7 times), but the author quickly shows his notorious slow pacing. It is a true joke that he can spend an entire page explaining the braid in someone’s hair and exactly how they pull at it when they’re angry.
But a lot of epic fantasy is notoriously slow with world-building.
I beat Starfield the first time before the bad reviews started overwhelming. And I still don’t get it (except perhaps as hype). Bethesda games are far from perfect (people seem to forget the negativity around Skyrim being compared to Oblivion), but they scratch a particular itch that millions of gamers have and crave.
What terrifies me is that this whole “Hey look, we’re getting 2006 again” attitude is exactly what’s going to kill off the Bethesda “genre” the same way SquareEnix gutted the AAA Turn-Based RPG. Sure, it means we might get a black horse game out of left field (Persona 5, talking about you) but it’s a shame to see so much hate on the style of game that Bethesda is.
And we need to make no mistake. While some complaints have been valid, the biggest ones that started this snowball have been things like “I shoot guns around guards and nobody comments” or “I murder an entire town and then pay a small bounty and everyone’s fine with me again”.
I get the “huge procedural universe is soooo boring” complaint; I don’t agree with it because I loved Daggerfall and because Starfield has more hand-made content than Skyrim, but I can respect it. But that alone doesn’t justify all this “worst game ever” BS. It makes Starfield sound like it’s worse than initial-release NMS was (and I can say from experience, it’s not).
And for me, I just crossed hour 180 with Starfield, and have not been bored once. I don’t expect it to be everyone’s favorite game, but it’s certainly mine for 2023.
The thing is that for a lot of Bethesda fans the game fully missed the mark that scratches the players itch. If there’s one thing people unanimously agree Bethesda games are great at it’s creating a world that’s interesting to explore. Starfield is by far the least interesting Bethesda game to explore, because there’s nothing interesting to catch your attention?
Jake brings it up perfectly. In Skyrim you start a quest and then you start traveling to the quest location. A dragon swoops in and you fight a dragon. A spooky cave is along the way and you check it out. An hour has passed and you’re not even at the quest location yet. In Starfield you start a quest, you fast travel to your ship, then you fast travel to the planet the quest is on, you land on the quest location, you walk to the actual and 10 minutes later the quest is done. Nothing interesting happened between the start of the quest and the end of the quest, except maybe for the quest itself.
In Skyrim a quest is an opportunity to explore, in Starfield a quest is a check on a checklist. I don’t think Bethesda has necessarily lost its magic but I do think Starfield is missing the Bethesda magic.
I put 150 hours into it and loved it. Bethesda is such a giant, and I guess this game had such hype that it completely distorted reality.
Funny thing is, I had no hype for the game. I didn’t think I’d even play it from the early previews and announcements.
But after it came out and people figured out it followed the Bethesda formula and was “Fallout in space”, then I got interested. It had been long enough that I’d played a Bethesda game that it sounded like fun, and it was.
There are a lot of things I’d like to change and refine with Starfield. But it’s still a good game.
Same here. I actually expected to be disappointed from hearing the early complaints. I got an xbox subscription because there were a bunch of games I wanted to play, so I wouldn’t feel bad if Starfield sucked.
That’s the thing though- I’ve already played fallout. I’ve already played Skyrim. There are mods and expansion packs that give me more of the same already.
What I expected wasn’t fallout in space, I expected innovation and iteration on a genre, not the exact same things in a new setting.
What I expected wasn’t fallout in space, I expected innovation and iteration on a genre
This is what’s weird to me. Bethesda basically promised “Skyrim in Space”, and that’s what most of the hype started to come from. And they genuinely gave us exactly that.
People who don’t like Skyrim won’t like Starfield. People who wanted something more “innovative” than just Skyrim in Space with Better Graphics were creating their own sort of fabricated hype.
Personally, I think it feels like a bit of a mix of Oblivion and Fallout 3, but with Skyrim-like updated graphics and such. But I kinda like that anyway.
But didn’t give us Skyrim in Space that’s the whole point
In Skyrim you start a quest and then you start traveling to the quest location. A dragon swoops in and you fight a dragon. A spooky cave is along the way and you check it out. An hour has passed and you’re not even at the quest location yet. In Starfield you start a quest, you fast travel to your ship, then you fast travel to the planet the quest is on, you land on the quest location, you walk to the actual and 10 minutes later the quest is done. Nothing interesting happened between the start of the quest and the end of the quest, except maybe for the quest itself.
The adventure was the point in Skyrim. There is no adventure in Starfield because “space is empty, and boring” - Todd Howard.
It’s kinda hard to respond to you with this when everyone else is arguing “they gave us Skyrim in space instead of innovating at all in the last 20 years”. In fact, just looked back and that’s the exact family of criticism I was responding to.
There is no adventure in Starfield because “space is empty, and boring” - Todd Howard.
Space is empty and boring but still has more hand-crafted (non-procedural) content than the entirety of Skyrim. New Atlantis is arguably as big as the 3 largest Skyrim cities combined. The main quest+faction dungeons are as big as the equivalents in Skyrim. The New London battlefield (for example) is pretty gorgeous and fairly massive.
There’s a genuine argument that maybe we don’t have enough "sprinkled in random places "quest starts that aren’t radiant, considering it’s only 50% more than Skyrim has but an dramatically larger universe. More quests that start like Mantis could go a long way, where you’re nudged towards the quest regardless of proximity. BUT, saying “there is no adventure in Starfield” seems somewhat off to the actual facts of the game… that there’s 50% more adventure in Starfield than Skyrim, but the map is 1000x larger.
The whole situation is blown out of proportion as is tradition in the modern world everybody can agree with that. But the complain is warranted in my opinion. What you might describe as a “genre”(it’s a style) can also simply be arguments against a lazy studio that doesn’t really progress in a meaningful way. Most of the issues people have with Starfield are the same they were having with almost all the games Bethesda makes. They simply ignore criticism about design. Of course it sells so they have an argument for continuing but that attitude made them stagnate as a studio. They never improved dialog choices. They never improved performance and optimization. They never improved npc AI. They never improved on UI design… They’re just painting by the same numbers every time just with the latest new tech in paint. So while the core is kinda dumb fun most of us like, it’s getting old now and we have every right to hold that against them.
We also cannot ignore all of the other studios making games in the same genre. CDprojeckt released Witcher 2 and 3 which are great example of progress and Cyberpunk which had a rocky start but was still miles in front of anything Bethesda story and role-playing wise. Obsidian themselves made a better Starfield since space exploration is a letdown in both. We just got Baldur’s gate but Larian made both Original Sins that were already chock full of what makes BG so great. Add to that Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Dark Arisen, Breath of the Wild, ALL the Souls games except for Demon. All of that in between Skyrims and Starfields releases. That’s a lot of competition, the genre changed and matured just like shooters did and so many other genres since. You just can’t slap a new coat of paint and then act offended by the criticism. Bethesda has shown many times now that they either ignore or simply don’t understand why they are getting negative feedback. Instead they rely on brand name, overpromise/lie, meme about their weaknesses (which is why I think they are lazy, they know) and then deflect criticism or blame players for being too picky.
That being said I also have over 100 hours in Starfield and I’m not saying it’s a guilty pleasure. It is fun to roam around being a half god everybody fears or love and everything being entirely without meaningful consequences. But I can’t ignore the shortcomings. And when I do so I keep remembering I’ve had the same for a decade.
Edit: I also don’t think the game is a 1/10 or whatever. I’d say it’s a 6 or so.
I think we can agree on some things, but I have no choice but to object to “genre = lazy”. There is a massive demand for a very specific set of gaming characteristics. Not only is it a silly move not to “scratch that itch”, but it’s a disservice to the fans of that genre to insist that there’s something inherently wrong to provide the exact itch in question.
I like obscure music from a dying genre that never really had a lot of legs. I just got introduced to a band called October Noir, and they’re blowing my mind. You could call them a cheap knock-off, a lazy attempt to get one last career out of the dead Gothic Metal genre. But as someone who has never had access to as many Gothic Metal albums as the mainstream gets access to Boy Bands, fuck that.
Bethesda addicts would consume 4 “Skyrim-Style games” a year, and have as much patience with them as hardcore gamers can be toward cheap soulsborne knockoffs. And I don’t think it’s an insult to the fan OR the companies making such a game.
Hey it’s totally fine if those games are enough then, more power to you. I still think you’d enjoy it even more if they did try a bit harder.
And I’m not saying genre=lazy, I’m saying there is no such genre as a “betheda game”. The lazyness is in the repetition and lack of meaningful gameplay improvement over the years.
I still think you’d enjoy it even more if they did try a bit harder.
I think that’s true of any game except when it isn’t. Half (or more) of the complaints to me about this game in threads of this post have been about situations where they DID try harder.
Take the NG+. Not only is this the first time they went through the effort to add that, but they arguably did it because it was one of the most requested feature for Bethesda games of all time. Now everyone hates it because “it doesn’t work for me with how deep I go into a playthrough building my base”. Had they “tried less hard” and either not given us NG+ or not given us a base-builder, people would be happier. A Bethesda game doesn’t NEED NG+ OR base-builders, after all.
Also take “how vast and boring space is”. They explicitly took the biggest hand-crafted world they’ve ever made, and the most hand-crafted quests they’ve ever made, and put it on top of a Daggerfall-tier progressive wonderland. All of these things are examples of them trying really flaming hard, to me.
What it really seems to me is that they gave us the kitchen sink with everything everyone wanted, AND Polished it certified less-buggy… and most complaints from people are that they really wanted a game that held your hand a bit more, only had the planets that were hand-crafted (can’t ask for more than the ones they gave, since their hand-crafted mapsize is massive), and didn’t include the heavily-requested features. Oh, and a more realistic physics engine for some reason I still don’t quite get.
Basically, the complaints were “this game isn’t an Outer Worlds remake and that’s what I was hoping for”. As I see it, many of the complaints about Starfield were them doing the opposite of the complaints people had about Outer Worlds in the first place. Do you remember that awkward alien planet in OW that’s only about 500 meters square with invisible walls?
EDIT: To be clear, if someone likes Outer Worlds more, that’s great for them. For me, the only complaints I have are silly ones about the lack of full-lego-power of the ship builder. I’d have preferred a less friendly ship-builder that lets me make the ship happen more like outposts do. Custom doors would be so much better.
In that way games are very similar to musical instruments like Fender and Gibson. Both have been selling the same thing for decades, their new stuff is pretty much just a shiny new version and the older the better.
Thank you for being the voice of reason. Talk about beating a dead horse. If you listen to the internet drama you’d think Starfield is the worst game ever made.
i just don’t get the appeal of the game at all. you load in, walk for a few minutes, talk to generic npcs to get generic quests, fast travel, walk for several minutes, shoot your way through unthinking npcs, scan some planets, etc.
bethesdas combat and writing has been lackluster for quite some time, but before they had the excuse of having interesting worlds to explore. here that is not the case. there’s like 3 or 4 copy pasted dungeons on most planets, and the rest is completely barren. i just don’t really see the joy in the game, it all feels so monotonous.
The copy/paste aspect of it is what really got me, and made me want to stop playing.
I’m okay with procedural generation, and there’s a lot of games that handle that sort of thing well. I never feel like exploration is a waste of time in Minecraft, for example, because there are always unique sorts of quirks about how the world is assembled that can still surprise you even if you’ve played for a while.
Starfield was fun for me early on. I was enjoying some of the sidequests and taking some time to just wander aimlessly in different planets. I would actually wake up feeling excited to play more during that first week.
But there was one moment where I was exploring a new planet, and I came upon the exact copy of a dungeon that I had done once already. Exactly the same, down to the layout of the halls, the trip mines placed up near the entrance, the locations of the enemies, and so on. That’s when it felt like I was running out of things to do. The world is procedurally generated, but it’s procedurally generated in a bad way, where there’s really only a small handful of different “things” that can just be anywhere, and there’s nothing really different in the ways that you can interact with them.
Plus the comedy of being on a no-atmosphere planet and seeing some of the clutter on outdoor balconies be, like, open food and drink packages as if people are just casually snacking in the vacuum of space.
yeah i completely agree. it’s in the details. there are so many oversights and inconsistencies that the game feels soulless, like they didn’t have a central vision they were trying to create. it’s a lot of jumbled parts that oddly feel both repetitive and disjoint. lots of the quests feel the same, and the game just gets so predictable.
It does get a lot of shit and I agree Bethesda is lacking in some creativity departments… but I’d still rate it a solid 6.5-7
I put about 80 hours into it. Enjoyed some aspects, disliked others. It’s just HEAVILY mid in my opinion. Worth a playthrough if you like Bethesda rpgs
6.5/7 is fine if you’re not paying $70 for the base game. It might be worth it now the costs have come down, but paying a premium price for a mid game justifies some of the shit people gave it.
That said, I played on Game Pass, big fan of the genre, and could only make it a few hours in. Just wasn’t for me. But then I really enjoyed The Outer Worlds and people shit on that too.
How does it compare to Outer Worlds? I found myself really bored in that game pretty often and I’m a huge Fallout fan so it surprised me how bland it all felt 90% of the time.
It’s really weird how many people stop “a few hours in”. Modern Bethesda games are notoriously slow-starts. A few hours in is still “training wheels” for the game.
I’m not saying you should go back to it, but how did you know it’s not for you that quickly?
As for Outer Worlds. I enjoyed it for what it was, but I’m of the fringe view that it doesn’t hold a candle to Starfield. It has more style, but less substance than Starfield IMO.
I feel like that hasn’t been true since Oblivion. Skyrim has you getting dragon powers a few hours in. Fallout gives you a gun and you’re blasting stuff right off the bat.
It’s those earlier games that force you to slow down. Morrowind for example gives you cave outside the first town that will almost certainly kill you if you go in.
Pretty much. In Starfield, the game gives you a ship that can reach about 75% of the star systems, and you can literally just start finding/stealing ships to cross the entire galaxy at the 1hr mark. If you know where you’re going, Starfield gets you in the action blazingly fast. If you don’t, well, that’s why they all (newer ones) hold your hand in the main story.
Ive not played a single bethesda game beside starfield that didnt hook me a few hours in. They arent that slow to start.
I found Arena horribly slow to start. Skyrim had a “reputation” since release of being a slow start.
Lol wasn’t Arena the first game they ever made?
Nope, The Terminator came first… And I don’t think that’s THE first game, either.
I only knew this because I did some research out of confusion. See, when I grew up I had a game by a company called “Bethsoft”, and I vaguely remember it being a joust clone (though I could be confusing two things). I remembered it real well because I was 9 years old and their logo was a “tastefully” topless fairy. And you know what “tasteful” means to a 9 year old boy lol
Edit, looks like their very first game was Gridiron!
Right. Arena is the first Elder Scrolls game.
Right. Arena has a special place in my heart. Never got close to beating it, but played hundreds of hours anyway. I wasn’t very good at finishing games at that age lol.
Daggerfall was a dramatically better experience IMO. Never beat that one either, but I played it more than Arena. If I recall, that one was the one where just chilling out and questing could cause the main quest to timeout.
For me, it was a lot of small moments that added up quickly. (By a few hours, I gave it at least 10 or so). One big one was I’d chosen the talent where you get a house on a planet but with a mortgage. I thought this would be a cool way to give me an economic incentive to explore more etc.
I get to New Atlantis and follow the quest for this and I find out the ‘mortgage’ has no penalties, isn’t paid in installments, and can only be purchased in a lump-sum. So, it was a talent that gave me the ability to purchase a house and be able to essentially rent it on a per day basis until the full amount was paid. When I finally do get there the house is empty, and not all that fun to be in. No special quests etc tied to it.
Another moment that soured it for me, and this is a minor quibble but again they added up, was visiting The Eye for the first time. There was this big pile of trash in a corridor used as the block to the door to prevent further exploration. It just entirely took me out of my immersion in what should have been an epic moment. So much so I actually took a screenshot of it at the time.
A lot of folks are likely happy to look past those things but they all added up + reviews from folks further along in the story and gameplay giving a bad impression made me move onto something new. Super happy other folks were able to find enjoyment, just wasn’t for me.
I also didn’t resonate with any of the companions to a degree where I found them actively annoying to be around. I know some would say ‘just don’t loot’ but their constant calling out people who like to loot was annoying too.
Whereas with Outer Worlds I immediately loved Pravati (and most of the other companions too). Starfield I felt like I was talking to puppets only there because I was playing the game. Outer Worlds I felt a connection to their stories as much as my own.
That said, many systems in Outer Worlds were underdeveloped and parts of the game felt empty. It was a game of high highs but also low lows. It did make me excited for the sequel to build on that foundation though.
Genuinely curious, but what systems did you feel added more substance to Starfield? Dialogue choices and completing quests in various ways really made Outer Worlds shine for me, particularly in the DLCs.
Help, now I’m stuck on Imgur again v.v
I mean… welcome to Bethesda-style?
I can see the value in tying a few quests to it. So is your preference that they gutted the background system entirely? Other than the parents, there’s very little unique content tied to them. They’re just “flavor”.
Honestly, this feels like DLC-bait to me. I can see why you’d want to “repair the eye to full working order” and maybe we will see that in the future. But for reference, there’s notes that imply the rest of the Eye is fully depressurized and needs to be repaired but time and money don’t allow for it.
This is what I think is happening with most people. They see reviews and they sour of an otherwise great game. I saw this happen with the Wheel of Time show as well.
This is a common Bethesda thing. If you want to be as thief, the list of companions that are ok with you stealing from everybody is fairly slim.
For me… to start, I’m a tES lifer. Most of what I like is the things tES does consistently. Grand-Theft-Spaceship. Low consequences. Decente stories for each faction. A good main plotline. Neat mechanics to play with, a few more than you really need. I enjoyed making ships and bases, playing around with powers.
Wide-not-deep is the Bethesda manifesto, but it works for the right gamers.
I enjoyed Outer Worlds. It doesn’t hold a candle to Starfield.
Agreed. I petered out in the early game on playthrough #2. Just decided “this isn’t really worth replays”
I just have a hard time committing so much time for the chance for something to get good. Same for anything else. People keep telling me to watch one piece, sorry not going to invest time in something I am actively not enjoying until it gets good X hours in. That’s not getting good, it’s Stockholm syndrome.
I mean, that’s what we ALL do when we play an epic-length game. But if you’re not into epic-length games, that’s cool
I disagree. A lot of epic tales grab you in the opening. In fact that’s a bit of a cornerstone of writing, grab them early. If there’s nothing for me to like in the first two hours of something, why should I assume it’s going to get better?
Fair enough. Don’t read the Wheel of Time then (or any Epic Fantasy, if we’re being honest) :)
I haven’t read those books, but is there really nothing interesting in them in the first few chapters? No breaks from the norm, nothing to grab you and keep you invested? Tbf epic fantasy, yeah, not my genre but it seems so foreign to me, having it be THAT slow of a burn.
The first book (about 900 pages if I recall) is largely an homage to Tolkien with the slow meandering journey punctuated only by a few action sequences. There’s a few incredible beats (surprise, Wheel of Time is my favorite literature and I’ve read the 14-book series 6-7 times), but the author quickly shows his notorious slow pacing. It is a true joke that he can spend an entire page explaining the braid in someone’s hair and exactly how they pull at it when they’re angry.
But a lot of epic fantasy is notoriously slow with world-building.
I beat Starfield the first time before the bad reviews started overwhelming. And I still don’t get it (except perhaps as hype). Bethesda games are far from perfect (people seem to forget the negativity around Skyrim being compared to Oblivion), but they scratch a particular itch that millions of gamers have and crave.
What terrifies me is that this whole “Hey look, we’re getting 2006 again” attitude is exactly what’s going to kill off the Bethesda “genre” the same way SquareEnix gutted the AAA Turn-Based RPG. Sure, it means we might get a black horse game out of left field (Persona 5, talking about you) but it’s a shame to see so much hate on the style of game that Bethesda is.
And we need to make no mistake. While some complaints have been valid, the biggest ones that started this snowball have been things like “I shoot guns around guards and nobody comments” or “I murder an entire town and then pay a small bounty and everyone’s fine with me again”.
I get the “huge procedural universe is soooo boring” complaint; I don’t agree with it because I loved Daggerfall and because Starfield has more hand-made content than Skyrim, but I can respect it. But that alone doesn’t justify all this “worst game ever” BS. It makes Starfield sound like it’s worse than initial-release NMS was (and I can say from experience, it’s not).
And for me, I just crossed hour 180 with Starfield, and have not been bored once. I don’t expect it to be everyone’s favorite game, but it’s certainly mine for 2023.
The thing is that for a lot of Bethesda fans the game fully missed the mark that scratches the players itch. If there’s one thing people unanimously agree Bethesda games are great at it’s creating a world that’s interesting to explore. Starfield is by far the least interesting Bethesda game to explore, because there’s nothing interesting to catch your attention?
Jake brings it up perfectly. In Skyrim you start a quest and then you start traveling to the quest location. A dragon swoops in and you fight a dragon. A spooky cave is along the way and you check it out. An hour has passed and you’re not even at the quest location yet. In Starfield you start a quest, you fast travel to your ship, then you fast travel to the planet the quest is on, you land on the quest location, you walk to the actual and 10 minutes later the quest is done. Nothing interesting happened between the start of the quest and the end of the quest, except maybe for the quest itself.
In Skyrim a quest is an opportunity to explore, in Starfield a quest is a check on a checklist. I don’t think Bethesda has necessarily lost its magic but I do think Starfield is missing the Bethesda magic.
I put 150 hours into it and loved it. Bethesda is such a giant, and I guess this game had such hype that it completely distorted reality.
Funny thing is, I had no hype for the game. I didn’t think I’d even play it from the early previews and announcements.
But after it came out and people figured out it followed the Bethesda formula and was “Fallout in space”, then I got interested. It had been long enough that I’d played a Bethesda game that it sounded like fun, and it was.
There are a lot of things I’d like to change and refine with Starfield. But it’s still a good game.
Same here. I actually expected to be disappointed from hearing the early complaints. I got an xbox subscription because there were a bunch of games I wanted to play, so I wouldn’t feel bad if Starfield sucked.
Then I’ve ONLY been playing Starfield since.
That’s the thing though- I’ve already played fallout. I’ve already played Skyrim. There are mods and expansion packs that give me more of the same already.
What I expected wasn’t fallout in space, I expected innovation and iteration on a genre, not the exact same things in a new setting.
This is what’s weird to me. Bethesda basically promised “Skyrim in Space”, and that’s what most of the hype started to come from. And they genuinely gave us exactly that.
People who don’t like Skyrim won’t like Starfield. People who wanted something more “innovative” than just Skyrim in Space with Better Graphics were creating their own sort of fabricated hype.
Personally, I think it feels like a bit of a mix of Oblivion and Fallout 3, but with Skyrim-like updated graphics and such. But I kinda like that anyway.
But didn’t give us Skyrim in Space that’s the whole point
The adventure was the point in Skyrim. There is no adventure in Starfield because “space is empty, and boring” - Todd Howard.
It’s kinda hard to respond to you with this when everyone else is arguing “they gave us Skyrim in space instead of innovating at all in the last 20 years”. In fact, just looked back and that’s the exact family of criticism I was responding to.
Space is empty and boring but still has more hand-crafted (non-procedural) content than the entirety of Skyrim. New Atlantis is arguably as big as the 3 largest Skyrim cities combined. The main quest+faction dungeons are as big as the equivalents in Skyrim. The New London battlefield (for example) is pretty gorgeous and fairly massive.
There’s a genuine argument that maybe we don’t have enough "sprinkled in random places "quest starts that aren’t radiant, considering it’s only 50% more than Skyrim has but an dramatically larger universe. More quests that start like
Mantiscould go a long way, where you’re nudged towards the quest regardless of proximity. BUT, saying “there is no adventure in Starfield” seems somewhat off to the actual facts of the game… that there’s 50% more adventure in Starfield than Skyrim, but the map is 1000x larger.The whole situation is blown out of proportion as is tradition in the modern world everybody can agree with that. But the complain is warranted in my opinion. What you might describe as a “genre”(it’s a style) can also simply be arguments against a lazy studio that doesn’t really progress in a meaningful way. Most of the issues people have with Starfield are the same they were having with almost all the games Bethesda makes. They simply ignore criticism about design. Of course it sells so they have an argument for continuing but that attitude made them stagnate as a studio. They never improved dialog choices. They never improved performance and optimization. They never improved npc AI. They never improved on UI design… They’re just painting by the same numbers every time just with the latest new tech in paint. So while the core is kinda dumb fun most of us like, it’s getting old now and we have every right to hold that against them.
We also cannot ignore all of the other studios making games in the same genre. CDprojeckt released Witcher 2 and 3 which are great example of progress and Cyberpunk which had a rocky start but was still miles in front of anything Bethesda story and role-playing wise. Obsidian themselves made a better Starfield since space exploration is a letdown in both. We just got Baldur’s gate but Larian made both Original Sins that were already chock full of what makes BG so great. Add to that Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Dark Arisen, Breath of the Wild, ALL the Souls games except for Demon. All of that in between Skyrims and Starfields releases. That’s a lot of competition, the genre changed and matured just like shooters did and so many other genres since. You just can’t slap a new coat of paint and then act offended by the criticism. Bethesda has shown many times now that they either ignore or simply don’t understand why they are getting negative feedback. Instead they rely on brand name, overpromise/lie, meme about their weaknesses (which is why I think they are lazy, they know) and then deflect criticism or blame players for being too picky.
That being said I also have over 100 hours in Starfield and I’m not saying it’s a guilty pleasure. It is fun to roam around being a half god everybody fears or love and everything being entirely without meaningful consequences. But I can’t ignore the shortcomings. And when I do so I keep remembering I’ve had the same for a decade.
Edit: I also don’t think the game is a 1/10 or whatever. I’d say it’s a 6 or so.
I think we can agree on some things, but I have no choice but to object to “genre = lazy”. There is a massive demand for a very specific set of gaming characteristics. Not only is it a silly move not to “scratch that itch”, but it’s a disservice to the fans of that genre to insist that there’s something inherently wrong to provide the exact itch in question.
I like obscure music from a dying genre that never really had a lot of legs. I just got introduced to a band called October Noir, and they’re blowing my mind. You could call them a cheap knock-off, a lazy attempt to get one last career out of the dead Gothic Metal genre. But as someone who has never had access to as many Gothic Metal albums as the mainstream gets access to Boy Bands, fuck that.
Bethesda addicts would consume 4 “Skyrim-Style games” a year, and have as much patience with them as hardcore gamers can be toward cheap soulsborne knockoffs. And I don’t think it’s an insult to the fan OR the companies making such a game.
Hey it’s totally fine if those games are enough then, more power to you. I still think you’d enjoy it even more if they did try a bit harder. And I’m not saying genre=lazy, I’m saying there is no such genre as a “betheda game”. The lazyness is in the repetition and lack of meaningful gameplay improvement over the years.
I think that’s true of any game except when it isn’t. Half (or more) of the complaints to me about this game in threads of this post have been about situations where they DID try harder.
Take the NG+. Not only is this the first time they went through the effort to add that, but they arguably did it because it was one of the most requested feature for Bethesda games of all time. Now everyone hates it because “it doesn’t work for me with how deep I go into a playthrough building my base”. Had they “tried less hard” and either not given us NG+ or not given us a base-builder, people would be happier. A Bethesda game doesn’t NEED NG+ OR base-builders, after all.
Also take “how vast and boring space is”. They explicitly took the biggest hand-crafted world they’ve ever made, and the most hand-crafted quests they’ve ever made, and put it on top of a Daggerfall-tier progressive wonderland. All of these things are examples of them trying really flaming hard, to me.
What it really seems to me is that they gave us the kitchen sink with everything everyone wanted, AND Polished it certified less-buggy… and most complaints from people are that they really wanted a game that held your hand a bit more, only had the planets that were hand-crafted (can’t ask for more than the ones they gave, since their hand-crafted mapsize is massive), and didn’t include the heavily-requested features. Oh, and a more realistic physics engine for some reason I still don’t quite get.
Basically, the complaints were “this game isn’t an Outer Worlds remake and that’s what I was hoping for”. As I see it, many of the complaints about Starfield were them doing the opposite of the complaints people had about Outer Worlds in the first place. Do you remember that awkward alien planet in OW that’s only about 500 meters square with invisible walls?
EDIT: To be clear, if someone likes Outer Worlds more, that’s great for them. For me, the only complaints I have are silly ones about the lack of full-lego-power of the ship builder. I’d have preferred a less friendly ship-builder that lets me make the ship happen more like outposts do. Custom doors would be so much better.
My mantra around it has been it’s the okayest game of the year.
I’ve been saying it’s the most Bethesda game that ever Bethesda’d.
In that way games are very similar to musical instruments like Fender and Gibson. Both have been selling the same thing for decades, their new stuff is pretty much just a shiny new version and the older the better.
Thank you for being the voice of reason. Talk about beating a dead horse. If you listen to the internet drama you’d think Starfield is the worst game ever made.
The way I understand this is not that it’s the worst game ever. It’s that Bethesda should be able to deliver better games.
It’s not the worst game ever made for sure. It’s definitely the okayest though.
I’ll play it when it’s $5
It’s on game pass… which is how I justified playing it. Not really paying anything extra 🤷♂️
i just don’t get the appeal of the game at all. you load in, walk for a few minutes, talk to generic npcs to get generic quests, fast travel, walk for several minutes, shoot your way through unthinking npcs, scan some planets, etc.
bethesdas combat and writing has been lackluster for quite some time, but before they had the excuse of having interesting worlds to explore. here that is not the case. there’s like 3 or 4 copy pasted dungeons on most planets, and the rest is completely barren. i just don’t really see the joy in the game, it all feels so monotonous.
The copy/paste aspect of it is what really got me, and made me want to stop playing.
I’m okay with procedural generation, and there’s a lot of games that handle that sort of thing well. I never feel like exploration is a waste of time in Minecraft, for example, because there are always unique sorts of quirks about how the world is assembled that can still surprise you even if you’ve played for a while.
Starfield was fun for me early on. I was enjoying some of the sidequests and taking some time to just wander aimlessly in different planets. I would actually wake up feeling excited to play more during that first week.
But there was one moment where I was exploring a new planet, and I came upon the exact copy of a dungeon that I had done once already. Exactly the same, down to the layout of the halls, the trip mines placed up near the entrance, the locations of the enemies, and so on. That’s when it felt like I was running out of things to do. The world is procedurally generated, but it’s procedurally generated in a bad way, where there’s really only a small handful of different “things” that can just be anywhere, and there’s nothing really different in the ways that you can interact with them.
Plus the comedy of being on a no-atmosphere planet and seeing some of the clutter on outdoor balconies be, like, open food and drink packages as if people are just casually snacking in the vacuum of space.
yeah i completely agree. it’s in the details. there are so many oversights and inconsistencies that the game feels soulless, like they didn’t have a central vision they were trying to create. it’s a lot of jumbled parts that oddly feel both repetitive and disjoint. lots of the quests feel the same, and the game just gets so predictable.