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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.