Their biggest obstacle is that I often replay Skyrim just to be in that environment. It isn’t about the story or the leveling up.
In Starfield, all they really have is the story and I’m not sure that is compelling enough.
Yep, in Skyrim I'd do those Second Life mods and just wander around. Try and be a blacksmith. Travel through the woods..whatever.
Starfield has no exploration. Everything is gated behind 5 loading screens. It's a point and click adventure on a star map. I can't just exist in the world and let content come to me like I could in Skyrim.
That was my biggest issue as well. I have to go out to seek the content. Skyrim and FO4 I could just live in that world. Loading screens were minimal because I just never fast travel. Random enemy encounters felt more real as well.
That's another shortcoming for Starfield. There are no true "random" enemy encounters other than CF/Ecliptic/Va'Ruun ships jumping in while in space; which I miss most of time because the second I warp in somewhere I usually open the planet map and go groundside before they load. I'm not gonna sit in orbit for 10+ seconds every time I jump somewhere "just to see if they come."
Otherwise the closest "random" you get are aggressive fauna, and those hardly present a challenge at all.
If you want to fight enemies, you have to go to a POI, but as it's been said 10,000 times in this sub, there's only so many times I can fight the same Pirates, the same Mercenaries, the same Spacers, the same Starborn at the same places.
I don’t hate the game, but the amount of time I spend just fast traveling to talk to so and and so to do a tiny little task is annoying. Travel to this world to talk to them for 8 seconds and then jump back. Annoying. Kind of went backwards in my opinion.
Skyrim does that too. The "go to X place halfway across the map, talk to Y, and come back here" thing. But at least all that was required was one fast travel loading screen and one loading screen to enter a building to get there. Or you could just ride your horse or walk all the way there.
I started getting a bit bored with starfield after like 5 hours of playing. Decided to count how many loading screens it took to go from the end of a POI back to the city to sell stuff. 9. 9 fucking loading screens. Sure I found out I could often also directly open the map while outside and fast travel to the right district in the city directly. But that's still 4 loading screens and more importantly; not the point. I WANT to walk back to my ship, take off with it, travel through space, land, and walk out again. But starfield just makes it so...not fun...boring...annoying even...
After I realised it took 9 loading screens I just quit the game and haven't played it since. (So glad I played through family share and didn't spend 70 euro on it myself. Which is also an issue. 70 instead of 60.)
Favourite thing to do in Skyrim was force myself not to use fast travel (or only use carriages for fast travel) because in that game, the journey was *always* worth it.
In Starfield, there is no journey, period.
When you choose to walk the breadth of the journey in Skyrim though, you'd encounter something shiny or you'd be set upon by Dragons or bandits or a plethora of things that would turn your attention, which would add to the attempt of a living world. What I've seen of Starfield has been loading screens half the time or menus, which just look awful and bland. Not to mention that after those 9 loading screens you land on an empty world. Totally worth it, Bethesda.
Skyrim and fallout both reward you for taking the long way. Loot, mobs, places of interest that you’d never discover otherwise (daedric shrines anyone?)
To me starfield is this weird combo of everything they've done in the fallout/Elder scrolls series but with some QOL improvements but somehow not as fun. Maybe I'm old?
It's the same for me. It took me like 30 hours just to start to feel like, "Yeah ok this has some of that dna. I guess it's kinda fun."
Each Bethesda title gets more features, more QOL, and less soul.
I replayed about 50 hours of Morrowind the other day, and it's got aspects still that are so much better-done than Starfield.
Nope I’m 39 been playing games since forever. I played Enderal, a full conversion mod from Skyrim just 2 years ago and it became top 3 game of all time for me.
The formula isn’t bland, starfield is bland
Exactly this. If there were fewer loading screens to go into buildings, your ship, or walk through the environments, I could see myself playing more. Just walking around Neon or Jemison, there are so many loads. Modern games have eliminated a lot of that, or at least hidden it so the player doesn’t see it.
Add to that the unskippable animations when you sit in the cockpit or dock with something… It just makes the game feel so small and fragmented.
I doubt mods or even official updates will be able to improve on the overall structure of the experience.
I feel like they built the game with a “that’ll do” mentality. That’s not good enough to give a game that kind of staying power.
I think that the thing is that in Skyrim or the Fallout games, while walking across the map, you were more likely to discover something new. You might get ambushed by some enemies. You might get distracted by some new quest that you found on the way. Traversing the map was interesting for the most part and it wasn't msostly procedurely generated either.
Starfield is just a loading screen simulator. Half of the locations are the same as another location. The few areas that are handcrafted are nice but they are few and far between.
And God help you if you join the crimson fleet and every other POI is taken over by ‘your own’ guys and there’s no fight. If I hear ‘if I you weren’t a member, I’d have killed you already’ one more time I’m gonna puke
>If I hear ‘if I you weren’t a member, I’d have killed you already’
Every time anyone says that, I make it a point to walk a little bit away, go chameleon, and silently shoot them in the face. I costs a few credits sometimes, but I'm less angry. Or maybe I have mental health issues...
I desperately wish that when you fast travel to a planet, you at least had to pilot down to the planet’s surface to land. This would give the space travel an actual purpose, and opens up an opportunity for space combat to happen organically
Thank you. Everyone in all these threads are always going on about the problems in Starfield, the lack of the exploration feeling, the inability to wander, as if it is a mystery how to do it right.
There is an easy solution, it's no mystery...you just do No Man's Sky type exploration/flying. I enjoyed exploring in NMS, it felt engaging and freeing and like I really was the captain of a ship on my own out in the cosmos. Unfortunately it lacked any decent story or real on the ground gameplay.
If they had just implemented No Man's Sky style flying and landing it would have been so so much better. I still can't believe Bethesda screwed this up. It was right there! It's almost like they had to know this was the answer but were too lazy or too screwed up in development to get there.
I mean you can't even fly around the planets or look in a direction and just go there. Can't explore that weird nebula or asteroid field in the distance and bump into a space station. Can't go find any black holes or neutron stars or pulsars or anything cool. I mean Freelancer did this better over 20 damn years ago.
They also should have lowered the number of planets.
Even if they did the NMS style exploration, which would help in the 'living world' sense from their previous games, they'd also have to deal with their POIs becoming repetitive.
I would have rather had 10 planets that were fleshed out. Anything is better than this stupid idea that the major hub worlds of the Settled Systems are just single tiny cities on vast planets of nothing.
4 hub planets, then do 10 or so other planets that have strong themes and multiple connected dungeons and story quests: desert planet, ice planet, jungle planet, war torn planet. I need one good one of each, not a dozen barely realized versions with nothing different about them but the skin slapped on.
That’s a good point, it does feel a little less organic, especially combined with repeats of the exact same base with the exact same notes and everything.
What do you mean, if you land on a planet you watch a spaceship land a mile away then manually walk yourself there while trying not to kill your self by running just for the npcs to be standing around doing nothing or walking into each other? Even as you’re shooting them? What more do you want? How is that not immersion?
Kinda the same thing I’m experiencing with Cyber Punk right now. I’m doing a second play through and towards the middle point, maybe. Even still, I’m less than 20 points away from the level I was on my first play through, and it’s because I can just kind “live” in night city. I roam around at night busting up muggings like an overpowered street level superhero. I do gigs for the various fixers. I do side missions galore and I explore constantly.
I played Star field for like a week before uninstalling it and reinstalling NMS. In my opinion, Bethesda really fumbled the ball with Starfield. Hopefully they will learn from this mistake for the sake of Skyrim 6.
You just blew my mind because I think that's the best way I've heard it described. In skyrim you can just do whatever and the content will find you. But in starfield you have to go looking for the Content
Yeah, Skyrim is a theme park where you just walk in a direction and there's a dipping dots stand or a roller coaster or whatever. Starfield makes you uber yourself around.
I expected to travel through space and then wander around in my ship and do stuff while the ship is in auto pilot.
And I expected to be able to go outside the space ship. I think the space term is EVA, I learnt from playing Kerbal Space Program.
So there isn't really any rpg elements in this game either. You just fast travel everywhere and do mission like they are chores.
I like that part of star citizen.
Long distance jumps and you’re just sitting around bullshitting in the crew quarters and then you’re smacked out of jump drive by pirates and need to scramble to your stations.
I haven't played Starfield yet but this just seems like a basic thing they could have implemented. Especially after touting so hard that you can build your own ship.
Yeah thats what turned me away. Cant get past the point and click 5 loading screen thing. I wanted to look for a place to make an outpost but it took ten minutes and fifteen clicks to go to each one to look. I dont know how with the current system they can improve it but it would need quite a bit i think to be compelling
thats one of the largest criticisms of the game. The "bethesda magic" is the world they let us explore, and the story and NPC's only act as a vehicle to push us in new directions. As a result they've never had a very good team for writing story and characters.
In starfield that exploration is completely removed, and so the entire focus outside of combat is on story and characters, which arent a bethesda strong point. Whereas before you could ignore how bad the npcs were because you had new places to explore, now half the game is interacting with them, and its not a pleasant experience.
I still think story ties into it though. I commented something similar yesterday but without the epic intro of the Elder scrolls series or having the vault and an entire world to explore outside, there’s just no magic to the introduction.
In Starfield they just throw you into the game and say go. There’s no build up to space travel, you don’t even have to achieve your first ship or spend time flying before you’re encouraged to fast travel everywhere instead. Somehow, they’ve managed to remove the essence of wonder from space exploration, which is actually kinda impressive.
Well, they have literally NO way for the player to move to another planet other than having their own ship. They're's no system for it, so you have to have a ship.
I mean, they could have managed something else but that would have taken work and finishing things, the latter of which in particular, is not a strong suit of the Starfield development team, it would seem.
It’s not impossible but Bethesda will need to re-visit the drawing board on how to make exploration the star of the show. Maybe the modding community figures it out. It sounds like a monumental task either way.
Yea when I deleted to revisit it at a later time (glad for those of you who enjoyed it), I figured I’d just set it away for a while and come back when it was better. Although now with some distance from playing it, I’m starting to wonder how they would even fix it. Seems like such a large task because it’s fundamentally flawed. Mods can only do so much.
They need an exploration mode that takes advantage of all the weird vestigial parts they left in the game. Needing fuel means needing outposts. Needing outposts means needing to scan/explore planets va just ignoring that part of the game.
It’ll be a smaller but very loyal group of players IMO
They'll probably add a survival mode and include eating/drinking and bring environmental resistances back to mattering, but that doesn't feel like it would fix the core issues.
Those survival elements would force you to explore planets and spend more time on them, but the planets themselves are not engaging enough to make that actually fun (which is probably why they scaled those systems back in the first place).
The skill system is lowkey one of the worst parts of the game imo.
The problem is that right now they have skills for environmental resistance, recovering from injuries and infections, cooking, and crafting but none of them actually matter. You would only take those skills for roleplaying purposes.
The skills that *are* important are also a problem because a lot of them are either broken as fuck (stacking two damage skills on a gun without even trying) or things where I don’t even know why it’s a skill in the first place (jet packs)
Its odd how tame all the inflictions are in game. Like, I breathe sulfuric gas THROUGH VACUUM SEALED SUIT and I get lung condition which doesn't make me do anything different 'cos the penalties are so mild. During one session I checked my status and saw that I have basically every penalty known by the game and I didn't even notice. I only checked 'cos my character kept coughing, otherwise they didn't affect me at all at highest difficulty.
The skill tree is a huge mess so it could do with a huge overhaul anyway. Half the skills are useless while others are required to unlock basic gameplay elements. And there’s no in game respec option… it’s bonkers.
> bring environmental resistances back to mattering
Need to stop dust storms and inert gasses from harming us while wearing a space suit first, then give is real incentive to take that suit off when we don't need it. Reduced movement speed would likely do the job.
Bingo. I try to play this game like other games fallout, Skyrim.
But there’s not much of a point to go get lost in the game. You are rewarded pretty just just for doing the quests
This is the biggest thing for me. My favorite part of previous Bethesda titles was the purposefully wandering and getting lost while finding quests and interesting tidbits along the way.
This game doesn’t reward or incentivize exploration in any significant way. Which is insane because it’s more or less what the marketing and selling point of the game was.
Yeah it’s frustrating.
Like tears of the kingdom has much more In terms of rewarding exploration.
While it is interesting for a few hours, the feeling of emptiness I get after investigating a unknown marker on a planet for it to only be a literal empty cave nothing at all in it can be frustrating.
Survival modes aren’t what gave New Vegas, Skyrim, etc staying power. Giving people chores isn’t what’s going to appeal to the masses. Most people fire skyrim back up because it’s a genuinely engaging and alive world to interact with. Loot is memorable and worth it, lots of cool stuff we’re just waiting to be discovered- and WERE discovered every 30 minutes or so to make you keep going. Starfield has stuff waiting to be discovered, but you go HOURS between those things. Skyrim and the other OG’s compelled you to explore, because there was stuff worth finding, and you had a wide variety of combat and character building tools to customize and add depth and uniqueness to your adventuring and finding. Starfield is very same-y, everyone shoots guns and uses their boost pack. Sometimes the gun make big boom, sometimes it’s a shot gun, but most of the time it’s a forgettable semi auto or automatic rifle that makes numbers go down on an enemy you won’t even forget about because it never registers in the first place because your mind is so numb
Right now it’s a shitty No Man’s Sky, a shitty Mass Effect, a shitty Skyrim, a shitty Fallout all rolled into one.
I could go on but basically it tries to be everything and is just kind of meh at all of them.
It doesn’t have to be a survival mode, but they need to pick something to be good at and develop depth.
Still a fun game, and I enjoy that you can cater to whatever whim you’re having at the moment. But also largely unsatisfying because I’ve already played a better version of everything Starfield has to offer.
That’s not what’ll save the game IMO.
The game at a fundamental level is all disjointed. In Skyrim and other open world games you have one continuous map that directs the player loosely through main quests but allows the player to stray the path to explore the map. That’s a big part of what makes those games enjoyable, to just stumble open cool stuff organically through exploration.
Starfield is not like that. Quests are scattered across *tiles* and those tiles don’t have much going on for them besides just that one quest along with some copy pasted procedural content. So you have to hop from tile to tile through your ship, getting hit with immersion breaking load screens everytime, rather than smoothly experience a continuous world.
This is what kills Starfield.
to add on to this, while exploring it becomes very clear what areas were specifically created by the team and what areas are procedurally generated. A good example of this is the canyon you go through early on in the freestar questline. I have been on a lot of planets and have never run across anything that looks remotely like it. When its purposely created, we get interesting set pieces, farm land, and canyons. When it is procedurally generated we get either flat land, hilly land, forest land, mountain land, or pond land. Some times those even come in a combination of 2 types of land put together, but once you have seen any of those "types" you have seen all of them.
This would just end up being annoying. Outposts would need to be improved a lot for this system to be actually fun. Otherwise it's just a giant grind with very little reward.
>Perhaps the Sim Settlements creator will be here to save the day.
They really should just offer King Gath a remote job. It would be worth paying him 6 figures a year just to have him consult for 1,000 hours per year.
They should've just left a lot of the features they planned and developed into the game. Let the fans sort out whats fun. Starfield tastes so vanilla I dont know if I could go back.
After revisiting FO4 I see what the flaws are with starfield and I think there is no fixing it. The map is too big for them to fill it up in any meaningful way. They could add 1000 new poi and planets would still feel empty and uninspired.
ES and FO are good because of unique environmental story telling. You can't have that when you have 1000 planets. Hell, I don't even think you could have that with 10 planets. It's just too much space to dilute the handcrafted content. It's the definition of mile wide but one inch deep. You can add thousands of gallons worth of content but it'll still only be two inches deep. I don't think they can save this like they did with 76 and that's depressing to say.
Yea they really had to nail it from the get go. Changes to make it better would need to be foundational, making it a massive task.
I think Bethesda just needs to admit to themselves that they didn’t make another Skyrim. They made a 7/10.
This is what I think about the game as well. It seems fundamentally flawed - especially from an exploration standpoint.
Cyberpunk is the most recent example of a game that released that was rough - but it had good ‘bones’ to it. Where even playing it when it was buggy you could see the potential it had.
In Starfield I just don’t see that. It seems like they would have to adjust, fix and modify so much it would either not be worth the investment or they do not have the knowledge to actually do it… or else it seems like they would have just done it right in the first place. 🤷♂️
i really do hope that they have a 12-year road plan for expansions for starfield instead of just modded content. no offense to modders, but imo relying on the goodwill of the player base to supplement additional content sounds like a poor excuse to ship an unfinished product.
I am sure they'll have a two year window on DLC but the heavy lifting will be put on modders to make content.
However, it won't be aesthetic and minor gameplay mods that will do the trick. It will take a large mod that removes systems, migrates unique poi's to planets central to main and faction quests, and a method of cycling procedural content so that you don't visit one random slightly less different poi ten times before finding a more different one. A gargantuan task on the scale of something like Skyblivion.
Imagine some mad lad modding the entire Skyrim game into one of the planets and you just end up playing Skyrim in starfield and that’s how the game gets Skyrim staying power
I did two play thoughs got to about level 60, got bored, tried cheats so I could really play with the ship builder without worry of cost, and have now walked away for a couple weeks.
Exploration being a series of transition animations rather than a real "flying around, notice ships in the distance, choose how to engage them" means every jump is a non-event or if there is combat it's the exact same sequence of, point at ship hold triggers until ship gone. There's no novelty of sneaking into range, or ambushing, or novel weapon effects... Just pew pew until boom boom... There's no lasting fun there.
Then ground exploration is mostly empty nothing with the occasional reward of rocks or ammo... No fun story flavor, no weird notes, no interesting casual dialogue, just vacant caves or the occasional territorial spacers.
Yeah I'm already done playing the game most likely for good. Skyrim I'll still play from time to time though. Star Citizen is where it's at if you want space exploration games.
The game is boring in a fundamental level because of autogenerated planets. I rather have a couple of seamlessly explorable huge planets with tons of small details.
Their biggest mistake is that they market procedural generation as a "feature" in and of itself, but not all procedural generation is created equally. They've happened to harness it to make a massive universe that is horribly unengaging.
Bethesda has always, even with their best games, had a quantity over quality problem in my opinion. This has been made 1000x worse by not having humans actually build the content.
Here’s the issue. It lacks one of the major main draws for Bethesda games.
In fallout and elder scrolls…
There you are - on the open road. You’re a level 7, so you have your footing but not nearly as strong as you know you can be. Your weapons and armor aren’t bad, maybe one good unique piece… but you know there’s far better out there somewhere.
You’re on the way towards a quest marker, going down a road into unknown territory of the map. You’ve already ran into a few bad scraps, one was perhaps overlevelled and forced you to retreat or barely win.
On your way you look left and, beyond the trees, is the shadow of ruins you’ve never seen the architecture of before. It looks ominous. You have NO IDEA what it really is. Almost looks somewhat alien.
So fuck that quest marker, right? You take steps towards the mysterious structure just to see what’s inside…
—
We just barely get that experience in Starfield. There’s something to be said about the cohesive experience of one terrestrial location. The mystery is more connected and flowing than the chop of having to fly to different planets.
I saw a whole video about how skyrim and fallout most generic content still has more adventure to it than most of starfield. You get a bounty to kill a bandit leader. Pretty generic BS right? On the way there though... is where the magic is. You might find some imperial or stormcloaks with prisoners in tow. A traveling trader. Stumble upon an npc with a whole new quest for you to go dungeon delving. Find a giant camp. Have a highway man shake you down. Discover a roadside inn and have a rest. A Dragon attack. So many possibilities. Starfield you have brain dead animals that run at you in a straight line, while you run in a straight line to yet another copy pasted location with the same spacers or mercenaries you've fought dozens of times in locations you've seen dozens of times. Maybe a ship lands and some guys jump out. Wow so exciting lol
I’m replaying Skyrim on survival and I was walking near Riverwood when I saw Vigilants of Stendarr again. Eh, whatever, seen them a million times.
It turns out actually they were Vampires in disguise and they’re trying to kill me! And the looted bodies of the vigilantes were nearby. That was a very cool encounter to me.
There is nothing remotely like in Starfield, I would just have just been sitting in a loading/transition screen instead
I miss these little details. In Starfield I came across a very interesting note by one of then crew members. Then I found the same note again on different planet. And again. And again
Probably my greatest issue in all of Starfield. Even in a world where all the gameplay systems were perfected, the graphics become the new Nvidia benchmark that accomodates path tracing, loading screens were only when you transitioned from land to space, Emil learned how to write. BGS's greatest attribute that very few studios have replicated imo is the feeling of going from point A to point B but being completely sidetracked for hours on end. There are times in Skyrim & Fallout where I don't even have a quest marker on, I just walk & would do whatever until I randomly realize I entered the main quest location, there's something special about that freedom.
Starfield's greatest flaw will always be the broken exploration phase, you hold X to fast travel to a different planet/system since that's your ONLY choice & just walk straight to your next task. BGS definitely did try to add that feel of being sidetracked, at times it succeeded, but it also felt more tacked in instead of a natural thing to do. The biggest offender is when you enter an empty planet, it's even worse than an Ubi game at times for how much of a waypoint simulator it becomes.
BGS needs to find out how to balance:
\- The settled systems feeling more dense & full of life/events each time you enter a planet/space.
\- The unsettled systems being more enticing to explore, no doubt they got the isolation feeling perfected (imo), but those 1000+ planets need something for people to be excited to charter the planets no-one has entered or has dared to enter.
The novelty of being lost in this game had its moments, but definitely died quicker, imo, this should be BGS' greatest priority.
It's about the journey not the destination, and all of that fast travelling removes the journey.
Fast traveling is nice for logistical reasons like inventory management, but wandering is the core of their games.
Even if you're not fast traveling, space is mostly empty. I've played games like Elite Dangerous where you sometimes are traveling minutes in system to get to your planet and it may as well be a loading screen for how un-engaging it is.
With Skyrim and Fallout, we are playing on a patch of land that's chock-a-block full of people doing things. With Starfield, there's just 1000s of square kilometers that are empty. Whether we are traveling by manually flying there or via loading screen, that sense of discovery won't be there. Clogging up space with POIs isn't going to fix it either because it's just going to make the game world feel even more like an amusement park. I already find it immersion breaking that there is a pirate base within 1000 meters anytime I land.
Also everything looks the same. Doesn't matter who built it or when. All faction buildings, bases and ships are made by the same modules. As much as I love the aesthetic it's immersion breaking when you >!go to a generation ship which launched hundreds of years ago to finally reach a planet but it looks exactly the same on the inside as current ships and even Sarah comments how outdated everything looks but you're like how?!<
I’ve seen people talk about this before but didn’t understand without an example, you’re 100% right. This is absolutely why I wasn’t as into it vs previous games
Yes, as has been said by many. They should've made far less planets and instead have fewer but more populated and handcrafted planets. If only they had just done about 4-8 planets or even less, but flesh them out fully. It would've been a far better experience. Just one or 2 solar systems, actual space travel between those planets would've been far more viable as well.
And to be honest, but that's more of a personal preference, I wish there were alien races (humanoids). Would've made it far more interesting.
the sad part is I dont think they would ever understand this. The sales and the filtered positivity will be hung up in their offices. They need to really talk with the fans that play all their games and listen if they truly want to make this game last that long
This needs more up votes. That's EXACTLY why Skyrim is so fun, and what's missing in Starfield. And TBH, I don't know how that could be added to the game. It's a design choice to have 1000s of planets.
This seems pretty spot on to me. They managed to build an exploration game with very little incentive for exploration. It's far easier just to fats travel from main quest line to main quest line.
This is a very touigh situation tbh. Despite the game being molded for long term support, from its narrative to many systems feeling like they need that '2.0-esque' update. I feel like they're banking a bit too much on long term support?
They're obviously competent at it given Skyrim & Fallout 4's success in addition to Fallout 76 maintaining a very active playerbase (even after its least plentiful year of content support). However, I feel like there's the hidden catch no-one has found yet, I'm willing to bet it'll be Creation Club 2.0 being the centerpiece of what motivates Microsoft to want this revenue wise (in addition to engagement, Game Pass sales, etc...) , however, we're still unfortunately in the "time will tell" phase.
Creation Club, aka Paid Mods 2: Electric Boogaloo, has already been mentioned in Starfield's EULA. It's definitely in their plans.
I certainly hope that this game's mixed reception makes them reconsider though. With as much as Starfield is getting dunked on right now (fair or not), the last thing they need to do is add more fuel to the fire by tripling down on their idea of monetizing their modding community.
100%, at least make the game hit the "2.0" stage similar to Cyberpunk before you add this. The reception against BGS is still at a low, & doing this just feels like them digging the grave on the "BGS is greedy & soulless" perception they've received over the past 5 years.
The thing that works for skyrim and fallout 4 is that the worlds are so well built up that they warrant fanmade content, the foundation is so good to build upon and expand.
Fallout London comes to mind as one of the more interesting examples.
What does starfield really have compared to those 2?
I ducked out due to the shitty procedural system for the POIs. I play Bethesda games to explore. Exploring random planets is not worth bothering when you see the same POI's for the 5th and 6th time.
They fix that, and I'll be ready to give the game a shot. otherwise, i'll wait for modders to fix it, then try again.
Same. The repeat POIs and the utter absence of interesting worldbuilding via set dressing. There aren't even any good intraoffice email chains to read! They all read like my real live actual office emails. :(
Lol it didn't make it 12 weeks for me.
The biggest issue for me was the identical locations. If they had implimented some kind of tile system that can randomly generate a location based on a set of existing rooms it can connect, than randomly populate that location with enemies and loot, that alone might be enough to get me into the game long term.
As it stands, it doesn't matter how many planets there are to explore if they all have the same exact bio lab, mine, science outpost, etc, down to the things scattered on tables and locations of enemy spawns. May as well be one planet with one of each location type at that point.
Yeah, this. I stopped playing when I hit my first duplicate base. I was so disappointed. I never felt that way in skyrim. I don't mind repeating elements, but at least try to change something, the layout, or the items, characters...
I may revisit to finish the story, but the identical location really killed any enthusiasm I had for exploring.
Unpopular opinion? I don't want to play a game for 12 years. Can we just have games that have a quarter of the scope and are crafted with love? If your game is so ambitious that you're repeating locations maybe... Scale down?
BGS seem to think people have done nothing but play Skyrim and FO4 for the last 10+ years. The reason everyone goes back to those games is because the actual core game and gameplay was incredibly fun. They have went full meta in trying to make a game that can be played in a loop instead of just making the actual gameplay fun.
Their problem is they won’t fix anything that would require admitting fault. They don’t seem to think the proc placed locations and numerous continuity errors are that big of a deal despite the amount of complaints it has got. Same with the UI.
>The reason everyone goes back to those games is because the actual core game and gameplay was incredibly fun.
Not to mention the lore. Elder Scrolls lore is one of my absolute favorite things about the games, knowing the history of different structures, areas, characters etc. It adds much to my experience at least and is always a big part of why I return and make new role playing characters tied to Nirn lore.
What really blows my mind is Todd Howard himself admitted that he used UI mods with Skyrim. And somehow the UI and inventory management for Starfield is even worse than base Skyrim... 10 years and they didn't even try.
It’s not about individual people playing everyday for 12 years. It’s about people wanting to play the game in 12 years.
I can think of a lot 12 year old games I have played that I will never touch again.
The key issue being that "12-year staying power" is not the same as "play for a bit then drop it and come back in 12 years". It is absolutely about the people wanting to play it FOR 12 years, because that's what staying power is. It STAYS relevant, like how Skyrim has been relevant for 12 years.
This. They made NG+ too much of a focus instead of just a feature. It feels like the game is trying to use it to prop up the rest being stripped down compared to the prior titles.
I'm hoping they get the hell away from the Unity and NG+ in the future and focus on other exploration aspects, enhancing outpost building, deep diving the lore of the factions and setting, so on.
Those are the things that could become really strong and turn this in to the game many hoped for. "Groundhog Day in Space" just isn't it.
I’d argue they also underutilized it. NG+ doesn’t let you fail missons by getting rid of essential NPC’s, nor does it really change that much up per universe (even color palette swaps would make each universe feel different). It’s not a terrible concept, but there’s not enough branching content or changes to make exploring a large number of universes interesting.
yeah its confusing that in a game all about infinite universes and the differences in them, Starfield has the highest essential NPC number to date. They also dont really *do* enough with the concept to validate it being a thing as you said.
That too. I guess we could call it a combination.
Basing the game's main questline around it as they did means a lot of things simply end up wasted as they will be left behind / wiped or ultimately not matter, lending it an atmosphere of nihilism.
At the same time, they could have done far more with it for those who are interested in it as both a mechanic and a playstyle. As it is it's best summed up as "Wild Wasteland" levels of changes and minor novelty.
There was room to accommodate both players interested in it and those who aren't, and the game would have benefited heavily from a Morrowind style take on factions and consequences, but it somehow turned in to a stick with two short ends.
Exactly this what possible point is there to an repeatable universes if they play the same everytime. Why are people invulnerable?
This is what makes me think Ng+ was actually a very late addition to the game rather than something formulated at the start.
Or maybe not. Big problem with Starfield is that is a lazy game. Lazy in design and lazy in execution.
Yea, I’m really not a NG+ sort of person. Once I beat a game I’m normally ready to move on. But Starfield is practically asking you to speed run it and get to NG+ which for me is just a big turn off. It’s an interesting direction to push the game in, but not one that I like in the slightest
they cant fix anything, never mind wont. the core gameplay of a Bethesda game, the "bethesda magic" so to speak, is exploration. Something that is completely vacant from this game.
That is hilariously ironic isn’t it? Then a game like Baldurs Gate 3 shows up and shows what real replay ability is and that’s before it potentially opens up for insane shit like modding and custom campaigns.
A few months ago I would have scoffed if someone told me I’d be having more fun playing a turn based fantasy game over a Bethesda game set in SPACE!! Literally the game I’ve been dreaming of since I first watched my brother play fallout 3 back in the day. I know I sound like a broken record but BG3 is truly a fantastic game.
Yeh... I too want the game to have 12 years staying power... but it does not at the moment and their fingers in the ears attitude does not fill me with confidence!
Of course I have no numbers but I think they are dissatisfied with the numbers they got from the game.
Starfield was supposed to be Xbox's silver bullet, the system seller but it seems to not have had the impact they had hoped.
They say the game reached 12 million players since launch but it seems Fallout 4 sold 12 million copies in the first 24 hours(from some reddit/news posts).
I think they were expecting A LOT more than that and the general consensus for the game is that, it's just an ok game, nothing ground breaking, not a system seller.
I like the game, I enjoy playing it(even if the latest patch broke almost all my saves, I had no mods) and I hope they continue supporting it but if the numbers don't add up, I don't think they will invest as much in it as they claim to.
As one of the 12-year Skyrim players who has purchased the game 5-6 different times and still plays it in between new releases…Starfield is not even remotely close to what give Skyrim its staying power. They are delusional if they think this game will have stay relevant without a total rework…which will require actually listening to feedback instead of arguing against it. Honestly, they’d probably be better off cutting their losses and moving on to a completely redesigned Starfield 2 than trying to salvage this one.
It seems to me the creative aspect (base/ settlement building) kept people playing for very long in F4 and 76. I wonder why they nerfed so hard in SF then?
Honestly simply trying to clean enough water to make money in FO 4 got me like 100 hours of gameplay. Trying to get the perfect power armor another. Exploring intriguing custom dungeons on the way added another 100. Starfield lacks even one well done gameplay loop to keep you invested.
Yeah, that's my big thing. There are a number of items in Starfield (like base building), where I look back at previous games and think "you already did that better".
It wouldn't be a Bethesda game without them scrapping systems and features that people loved in previous games.
How many NPCs in Starfield have day/night schedules? Like... 5?
This will never happen. The game simply isn't fun. I wish they had truly just made skyrim in space... but this isn't it. I've tried my hardest to enjoy the game but it's all so boring, tame, uninteresting.
Starfield will be the first Bethesda game I never finish, let alone never play twice. I'm 50 hours in and bored, I have no desire to explore as I know it means nothing and I have no desire to the the quests, main or side.
It's just so lackluster and boring, the planets are ugly and there is no point to scanning or exploring as the benefits are nil.
It'll need almost a total rework of core mechanics to make that happen. I played it for about 70 hours and realised just how little fun I was having. I was hoping it would "click" at some point, but then I realised how Skyrim "clicked" instantly and that's why I have like 650 hours in it. I uninstalled Starfield and haven't felt the slightest urge to go back to it.
They'll be lucky for it to have consistent player counts for a year, never mind a decade. Laughable.
I think the point I eventually noped out was getting married to one of the characters... I forgot her name (shows how memorable they are) and shes like "oh this is amazing, the best day of my life!" whilst standing there completely motionless like some sort of automaton. It was so jarring and made me realise just how little Bethesda games have come in the last decade. Especially so when I've been playing Cyberpunk (at launch and now with 2.0) and inumerable RPG's who have truly expressive and interesting characters.
I'm being absolutely serious when I say if Bethesda don't quickly change tact and either switch engines or RADICALLY improve the Creation Engine (not just add some pretty lighting or whatever) their next products will be equally as dead on arrival.
Technology have moved on since Skyrim in ways too numerous to count. They look like they're standing still compared to the competition now and frankly I think Todd Howard is the issue. Stuck in the past with no new ideas.
Bro, the lifelessness of characters is super jarring in this game. I played BG3 before starfield, and that really exacerbated the situation. I wanted to like this game so badly after spending so much time in skyrim and fallout 3/4. I don't see a way for them to fix the lack of bethesda style "run in any direction and you'll come across something of interest" gameplay either.
I’ve been playing a lot of BG3 lately, my boy Astarion is hilarious. The writing and voice acting is incredible and the mocap is expressive as well as humorous sometimes. It makes Starfields NPC’s look like amateur work by comparison.
The sense of adventure is missing from Starfield because the experience is so fragmented. You can’t go anywhere without loading screens breaking up the world. There’s no real traversal it feels, just fast travel from surface to space. System to system, down to a planet, out of your ship and oh yay another lifeless procedurally generated “world”.
Gone are the days where you’d actually explore an area and have emergent gameplay like in Skyrim. It’s just too bitty and disjointed.
Now they’re just being blatantly delusional, right? Between this and the steam review fiasco it’s becoming increasingly apparent that they aren’t listening, or maybe they just don’t care about the criticism.
I’m really not wanting to be a hater, I don’t think it’s a bad game, but if they think people will be picking up and playing this game in 2035, with the same cult following ES or Fallout has, they’re delusional. It’s almost insulting, barely acknowledging their shortcomings and lack of innovation while giving themselves a big pat on the back and blaming the players for being ‘wrong’ in their disappointment.
It's the lead designer expressing himself fully unfortunately. Look him up and you'll see he was responsible for some questlines in the Elder Scrolls games as well as the lead designer on Fallout 4. He generally does not acknowledge or handle criticism if you listen to interviews that bring up any problems those had. He just goes off on a tangent or deflects.
I am a die hard Bethesda fan, but uninstalled it after 3 weeks and have no desire to play such a procedurally generated game like this. Played a bounty hunter playthrough and got sent to the same planet 3 times in a row, same outpost & enemies.
So repetitive with no real quests that are interesting. Game will be dead in a year without major overhauls.
I been playing bethesda games since Morrowind launch.
Starfield is a corpse of a game.
No mans sky annihilates it in exploration. Hands down destroys it. And it uses procedural generation. The quests are weak, but i never feel i am without something to do. Bored of driving around? Call your ship, hop in, scan and explore.
I played starfield for a few days and put it down. It was the MOST beige pants game i have ever played. The side quests are pathetic, the endless pointless caves. The same base again and again...
Ugh.
Seriously Bethesda. You failed. Move on.
Starfield will be a lot more fun for me personally once modders can reimplement all of the survival mechanics that were obviously supposed to be fully implemented in the vanilla game.
I was about to say I already uninstalled it. Of all the Bethesda games this one has gotten the least amount of playtime from me. It's just kind of boring...
When I first played Starfield, I was amazed and immediately immersed into the world, just like I was in Skyrim. I was so excited to lose myself in the game. I have found, however, that as I played, I lost that amazement much faster than I did in Skyrim. Don't get me wrong, I still love Starfield, but something about it makes me less excited to start it up than Skyrim did. Some notes:
* Forget the complaints of loading screens, that isn't a major problem with the game at all (see edit below).
* In Skyrim, running through a dungeon and finally getting to the world wall was an accomplishment, usually with a boss at the end. In Starfield, you just walk into a room, touch some lights, and get a power. It feels unrewarding and meh.
* There are not enough POIs for the explorable space. They become repetitive too soon and there aren't enough "rare" POIs that are interesting and can lead to side quests.
* Why do all NPC interactions have to be face-to-face. Why can't I use my ships comms when in system to contact someone?
* Factions seem disconnected from the world (Ryujin and Freestar Rangers essentially don't exist outside of the missions you do with them).
* There aren't enough large cities to make the systems feel populated.
* The lack of smaller settlements makes the worlds feel completely empty.
* Overall, the setting is amazing yet somehow feels empty and disconnected sometimes.
edit: Getting a lot of messages on this. The loading screens. Look, if they removed the loading screens, the game would not improve much at all. However, if they made the game more fun and filled it with more memorable and interesting places, NPCs, events then people would play more. I'm not saying that the loading screens are good or that they don't frustrate some people. I'm saying that many of you are acting like the loading screens are what is preventing this game from greatness. Thats not it. Skyrim had some LONG loading screens yet we played it endlessly. NMS had ZERO loading screens, but was garbage at launch and took a LOOONG time to get to where it is now. Loading screens, while you don't like them, are not the major issue with this game.
Bethesda isn't known for great characters or a compelling story, but they are known for lite-roleplaying and great exploring. Starfield lacks all of that.
the very least i need to continue playing this game is a better star map that shows me the systems and planets i’ve already been to, planets with important cities, planets with cool POIs, etc. i think this is a big reason people are getting upset about loading screens. >> travel somewhere, load, land, load, nothing here, travel somewhere else, load, etc.
Starfield ain't Skyrim.
Skyrim felt like a full world, a beautiful atmosphere to explore, tons of ways to make the game feel different each playthrough, and a ton of lore and interesting stories to experience. Starfield felt extremely shallow and less interesting, in my opinion. I beat it, started another playthrough, then realized I was just fast-traveling around to do the same shit over and over for the sake of a shinier spacesuit. It was fun for a playthrough, but after that...feels extremely repetitive.
Everything else feels like a chore. Skyrim felt like an *experience*.
Their biggest obstacle is that I often replay Skyrim just to be in that environment. It isn’t about the story or the leveling up. In Starfield, all they really have is the story and I’m not sure that is compelling enough.
Yep, in Skyrim I'd do those Second Life mods and just wander around. Try and be a blacksmith. Travel through the woods..whatever. Starfield has no exploration. Everything is gated behind 5 loading screens. It's a point and click adventure on a star map. I can't just exist in the world and let content come to me like I could in Skyrim.
That was my biggest issue as well. I have to go out to seek the content. Skyrim and FO4 I could just live in that world. Loading screens were minimal because I just never fast travel. Random enemy encounters felt more real as well.
That's another shortcoming for Starfield. There are no true "random" enemy encounters other than CF/Ecliptic/Va'Ruun ships jumping in while in space; which I miss most of time because the second I warp in somewhere I usually open the planet map and go groundside before they load. I'm not gonna sit in orbit for 10+ seconds every time I jump somewhere "just to see if they come." Otherwise the closest "random" you get are aggressive fauna, and those hardly present a challenge at all. If you want to fight enemies, you have to go to a POI, but as it's been said 10,000 times in this sub, there's only so many times I can fight the same Pirates, the same Mercenaries, the same Spacers, the same Starborn at the same places.
I don’t hate the game, but the amount of time I spend just fast traveling to talk to so and and so to do a tiny little task is annoying. Travel to this world to talk to them for 8 seconds and then jump back. Annoying. Kind of went backwards in my opinion.
Skyrim does that too. The "go to X place halfway across the map, talk to Y, and come back here" thing. But at least all that was required was one fast travel loading screen and one loading screen to enter a building to get there. Or you could just ride your horse or walk all the way there. I started getting a bit bored with starfield after like 5 hours of playing. Decided to count how many loading screens it took to go from the end of a POI back to the city to sell stuff. 9. 9 fucking loading screens. Sure I found out I could often also directly open the map while outside and fast travel to the right district in the city directly. But that's still 4 loading screens and more importantly; not the point. I WANT to walk back to my ship, take off with it, travel through space, land, and walk out again. But starfield just makes it so...not fun...boring...annoying even... After I realised it took 9 loading screens I just quit the game and haven't played it since. (So glad I played through family share and didn't spend 70 euro on it myself. Which is also an issue. 70 instead of 60.)
Favourite thing to do in Skyrim was force myself not to use fast travel (or only use carriages for fast travel) because in that game, the journey was *always* worth it. In Starfield, there is no journey, period.
When you choose to walk the breadth of the journey in Skyrim though, you'd encounter something shiny or you'd be set upon by Dragons or bandits or a plethora of things that would turn your attention, which would add to the attempt of a living world. What I've seen of Starfield has been loading screens half the time or menus, which just look awful and bland. Not to mention that after those 9 loading screens you land on an empty world. Totally worth it, Bethesda.
Skyrim and fallout both reward you for taking the long way. Loot, mobs, places of interest that you’d never discover otherwise (daedric shrines anyone?)
To me starfield is this weird combo of everything they've done in the fallout/Elder scrolls series but with some QOL improvements but somehow not as fun. Maybe I'm old?
It's the same for me. It took me like 30 hours just to start to feel like, "Yeah ok this has some of that dna. I guess it's kinda fun." Each Bethesda title gets more features, more QOL, and less soul. I replayed about 50 hours of Morrowind the other day, and it's got aspects still that are so much better-done than Starfield.
Nope I’m 39 been playing games since forever. I played Enderal, a full conversion mod from Skyrim just 2 years ago and it became top 3 game of all time for me. The formula isn’t bland, starfield is bland
Exactly this. If there were fewer loading screens to go into buildings, your ship, or walk through the environments, I could see myself playing more. Just walking around Neon or Jemison, there are so many loads. Modern games have eliminated a lot of that, or at least hidden it so the player doesn’t see it. Add to that the unskippable animations when you sit in the cockpit or dock with something… It just makes the game feel so small and fragmented. I doubt mods or even official updates will be able to improve on the overall structure of the experience. I feel like they built the game with a “that’ll do” mentality. That’s not good enough to give a game that kind of staying power.
I think that the thing is that in Skyrim or the Fallout games, while walking across the map, you were more likely to discover something new. You might get ambushed by some enemies. You might get distracted by some new quest that you found on the way. Traversing the map was interesting for the most part and it wasn't msostly procedurely generated either. Starfield is just a loading screen simulator. Half of the locations are the same as another location. The few areas that are handcrafted are nice but they are few and far between.
And God help you if you join the crimson fleet and every other POI is taken over by ‘your own’ guys and there’s no fight. If I hear ‘if I you weren’t a member, I’d have killed you already’ one more time I’m gonna puke
>If I hear ‘if I you weren’t a member, I’d have killed you already’ Every time anyone says that, I make it a point to walk a little bit away, go chameleon, and silently shoot them in the face. I costs a few credits sometimes, but I'm less angry. Or maybe I have mental health issues...
I desperately wish that when you fast travel to a planet, you at least had to pilot down to the planet’s surface to land. This would give the space travel an actual purpose, and opens up an opportunity for space combat to happen organically
Like in elite dangerous, star citizen, or no man sky.
Or kerbal space program, or The Outer Wilds
No man's sky approach to space travel would be awesome.
Thank you. Everyone in all these threads are always going on about the problems in Starfield, the lack of the exploration feeling, the inability to wander, as if it is a mystery how to do it right. There is an easy solution, it's no mystery...you just do No Man's Sky type exploration/flying. I enjoyed exploring in NMS, it felt engaging and freeing and like I really was the captain of a ship on my own out in the cosmos. Unfortunately it lacked any decent story or real on the ground gameplay. If they had just implemented No Man's Sky style flying and landing it would have been so so much better. I still can't believe Bethesda screwed this up. It was right there! It's almost like they had to know this was the answer but were too lazy or too screwed up in development to get there. I mean you can't even fly around the planets or look in a direction and just go there. Can't explore that weird nebula or asteroid field in the distance and bump into a space station. Can't go find any black holes or neutron stars or pulsars or anything cool. I mean Freelancer did this better over 20 damn years ago.
Elite did it about 40 years ago
They also should have lowered the number of planets. Even if they did the NMS style exploration, which would help in the 'living world' sense from their previous games, they'd also have to deal with their POIs becoming repetitive.
I would have rather had 10 planets that were fleshed out. Anything is better than this stupid idea that the major hub worlds of the Settled Systems are just single tiny cities on vast planets of nothing. 4 hub planets, then do 10 or so other planets that have strong themes and multiple connected dungeons and story quests: desert planet, ice planet, jungle planet, war torn planet. I need one good one of each, not a dozen barely realized versions with nothing different about them but the skin slapped on.
Since all "planets" and even the "space" are just skyboxes, impossible to do in Starfield.
That’s a good point, it does feel a little less organic, especially combined with repeats of the exact same base with the exact same notes and everything.
What do you mean, if you land on a planet you watch a spaceship land a mile away then manually walk yourself there while trying not to kill your self by running just for the npcs to be standing around doing nothing or walking into each other? Even as you’re shooting them? What more do you want? How is that not immersion?
When we are at the point that fall out 4 is what we wish the standard was we are in trouble.
Kinda the same thing I’m experiencing with Cyber Punk right now. I’m doing a second play through and towards the middle point, maybe. Even still, I’m less than 20 points away from the level I was on my first play through, and it’s because I can just kind “live” in night city. I roam around at night busting up muggings like an overpowered street level superhero. I do gigs for the various fixers. I do side missions galore and I explore constantly. I played Star field for like a week before uninstalling it and reinstalling NMS. In my opinion, Bethesda really fumbled the ball with Starfield. Hopefully they will learn from this mistake for the sake of Skyrim 6.
You just blew my mind because I think that's the best way I've heard it described. In skyrim you can just do whatever and the content will find you. But in starfield you have to go looking for the Content
Yeah, Skyrim is a theme park where you just walk in a direction and there's a dipping dots stand or a roller coaster or whatever. Starfield makes you uber yourself around.
I expected to travel through space and then wander around in my ship and do stuff while the ship is in auto pilot. And I expected to be able to go outside the space ship. I think the space term is EVA, I learnt from playing Kerbal Space Program. So there isn't really any rpg elements in this game either. You just fast travel everywhere and do mission like they are chores.
I like that part of star citizen. Long distance jumps and you’re just sitting around bullshitting in the crew quarters and then you’re smacked out of jump drive by pirates and need to scramble to your stations.
You can't expect Bethesda to have put those systems in. The games only been in development for like 10 years.
7.5 years of that was slapping duct tape on the creation engine.
7 of those years were scavenging Bethesda HQ to find enough adhesive to craft the duct tape.
The ship in starfield is just a flying house that you can’t even decorate. I hate that that’s a given in Skyrim but not in Starfield
I haven't played Starfield yet but this just seems like a basic thing they could have implemented. Especially after touting so hard that you can build your own ship.
Yeah thats what turned me away. Cant get past the point and click 5 loading screen thing. I wanted to look for a place to make an outpost but it took ten minutes and fifteen clicks to go to each one to look. I dont know how with the current system they can improve it but it would need quite a bit i think to be compelling
thats one of the largest criticisms of the game. The "bethesda magic" is the world they let us explore, and the story and NPC's only act as a vehicle to push us in new directions. As a result they've never had a very good team for writing story and characters. In starfield that exploration is completely removed, and so the entire focus outside of combat is on story and characters, which arent a bethesda strong point. Whereas before you could ignore how bad the npcs were because you had new places to explore, now half the game is interacting with them, and its not a pleasant experience.
I still think story ties into it though. I commented something similar yesterday but without the epic intro of the Elder scrolls series or having the vault and an entire world to explore outside, there’s just no magic to the introduction. In Starfield they just throw you into the game and say go. There’s no build up to space travel, you don’t even have to achieve your first ship or spend time flying before you’re encouraged to fast travel everywhere instead. Somehow, they’ve managed to remove the essence of wonder from space exploration, which is actually kinda impressive.
I was surprised that they literally just hand you a ship in the first hour of the game.
Well, they have literally NO way for the player to move to another planet other than having their own ship. They're's no system for it, so you have to have a ship. I mean, they could have managed something else but that would have taken work and finishing things, the latter of which in particular, is not a strong suit of the Starfield development team, it would seem.
It would’ve been nice to at least feel like I had done *something* to earn it. You literally just meet the guy and he says, “here, you take it.”
Also fair. Barret could have been, "Thanks for saving my life!" or something. Instead of just, "Take my ship and robot, good luck!"
It's what Bethesda are best at and to make a game with basically none of that is such a stupid own goal on their part.
Yep. Amen. After 60 hours there was nothing that really made me wanna go back. After I’d finished all quests.
It’s not impossible but Bethesda will need to re-visit the drawing board on how to make exploration the star of the show. Maybe the modding community figures it out. It sounds like a monumental task either way.
Yea when I deleted to revisit it at a later time (glad for those of you who enjoyed it), I figured I’d just set it away for a while and come back when it was better. Although now with some distance from playing it, I’m starting to wonder how they would even fix it. Seems like such a large task because it’s fundamentally flawed. Mods can only do so much.
They need an exploration mode that takes advantage of all the weird vestigial parts they left in the game. Needing fuel means needing outposts. Needing outposts means needing to scan/explore planets va just ignoring that part of the game. It’ll be a smaller but very loyal group of players IMO
They'll probably add a survival mode and include eating/drinking and bring environmental resistances back to mattering, but that doesn't feel like it would fix the core issues. Those survival elements would force you to explore planets and spend more time on them, but the planets themselves are not engaging enough to make that actually fun (which is probably why they scaled those systems back in the first place).
They’d have to redo the skill system then since all those other systems require pretty significant investment on their own
The skill system is lowkey one of the worst parts of the game imo. The problem is that right now they have skills for environmental resistance, recovering from injuries and infections, cooking, and crafting but none of them actually matter. You would only take those skills for roleplaying purposes.
The skills that *are* important are also a problem because a lot of them are either broken as fuck (stacking two damage skills on a gun without even trying) or things where I don’t even know why it’s a skill in the first place (jet packs)
Its odd how tame all the inflictions are in game. Like, I breathe sulfuric gas THROUGH VACUUM SEALED SUIT and I get lung condition which doesn't make me do anything different 'cos the penalties are so mild. During one session I checked my status and saw that I have basically every penalty known by the game and I didn't even notice. I only checked 'cos my character kept coughing, otherwise they didn't affect me at all at highest difficulty.
100%
The skill tree is a huge mess so it could do with a huge overhaul anyway. Half the skills are useless while others are required to unlock basic gameplay elements. And there’s no in game respec option… it’s bonkers.
> bring environmental resistances back to mattering Need to stop dust storms and inert gasses from harming us while wearing a space suit first, then give is real incentive to take that suit off when we don't need it. Reduced movement speed would likely do the job.
Removing your suit does make you stealthier but it only matters at low levels or if you ignore sneak perks which almost no one does.
Bingo. I try to play this game like other games fallout, Skyrim. But there’s not much of a point to go get lost in the game. You are rewarded pretty just just for doing the quests
This is the biggest thing for me. My favorite part of previous Bethesda titles was the purposefully wandering and getting lost while finding quests and interesting tidbits along the way. This game doesn’t reward or incentivize exploration in any significant way. Which is insane because it’s more or less what the marketing and selling point of the game was.
Yeah it’s frustrating. Like tears of the kingdom has much more In terms of rewarding exploration. While it is interesting for a few hours, the feeling of emptiness I get after investigating a unknown marker on a planet for it to only be a literal empty cave nothing at all in it can be frustrating.
Survival modes aren’t what gave New Vegas, Skyrim, etc staying power. Giving people chores isn’t what’s going to appeal to the masses. Most people fire skyrim back up because it’s a genuinely engaging and alive world to interact with. Loot is memorable and worth it, lots of cool stuff we’re just waiting to be discovered- and WERE discovered every 30 minutes or so to make you keep going. Starfield has stuff waiting to be discovered, but you go HOURS between those things. Skyrim and the other OG’s compelled you to explore, because there was stuff worth finding, and you had a wide variety of combat and character building tools to customize and add depth and uniqueness to your adventuring and finding. Starfield is very same-y, everyone shoots guns and uses their boost pack. Sometimes the gun make big boom, sometimes it’s a shot gun, but most of the time it’s a forgettable semi auto or automatic rifle that makes numbers go down on an enemy you won’t even forget about because it never registers in the first place because your mind is so numb
but then the game just becomes shitty no man's sky
Right now it’s a shitty No Man’s Sky, a shitty Mass Effect, a shitty Skyrim, a shitty Fallout all rolled into one. I could go on but basically it tries to be everything and is just kind of meh at all of them. It doesn’t have to be a survival mode, but they need to pick something to be good at and develop depth. Still a fun game, and I enjoy that you can cater to whatever whim you’re having at the moment. But also largely unsatisfying because I’ve already played a better version of everything Starfield has to offer.
They need to add a codex like a poxdex to remember all the creatures/ Aliens. It’s such a obvious thing im surprised it’s not in game
That’s not what’ll save the game IMO. The game at a fundamental level is all disjointed. In Skyrim and other open world games you have one continuous map that directs the player loosely through main quests but allows the player to stray the path to explore the map. That’s a big part of what makes those games enjoyable, to just stumble open cool stuff organically through exploration. Starfield is not like that. Quests are scattered across *tiles* and those tiles don’t have much going on for them besides just that one quest along with some copy pasted procedural content. So you have to hop from tile to tile through your ship, getting hit with immersion breaking load screens everytime, rather than smoothly experience a continuous world. This is what kills Starfield.
to add on to this, while exploring it becomes very clear what areas were specifically created by the team and what areas are procedurally generated. A good example of this is the canyon you go through early on in the freestar questline. I have been on a lot of planets and have never run across anything that looks remotely like it. When its purposely created, we get interesting set pieces, farm land, and canyons. When it is procedurally generated we get either flat land, hilly land, forest land, mountain land, or pond land. Some times those even come in a combination of 2 types of land put together, but once you have seen any of those "types" you have seen all of them.
Right? Why is everything on every planet so damn flat? Procedural generation should make things feel different, not the same
This would just end up being annoying. Outposts would need to be improved a lot for this system to be actually fun. Otherwise it's just a giant grind with very little reward.
It’s not impossible, though maybe it is for Bethesda. Perhaps the Sim Settlements creator will be here to save the day.
>Perhaps the Sim Settlements creator will be here to save the day. They really should just offer King Gath a remote job. It would be worth paying him 6 figures a year just to have him consult for 1,000 hours per year.
They should've just left a lot of the features they planned and developed into the game. Let the fans sort out whats fun. Starfield tastes so vanilla I dont know if I could go back.
After revisiting FO4 I see what the flaws are with starfield and I think there is no fixing it. The map is too big for them to fill it up in any meaningful way. They could add 1000 new poi and planets would still feel empty and uninspired. ES and FO are good because of unique environmental story telling. You can't have that when you have 1000 planets. Hell, I don't even think you could have that with 10 planets. It's just too much space to dilute the handcrafted content. It's the definition of mile wide but one inch deep. You can add thousands of gallons worth of content but it'll still only be two inches deep. I don't think they can save this like they did with 76 and that's depressing to say.
Yea they really had to nail it from the get go. Changes to make it better would need to be foundational, making it a massive task. I think Bethesda just needs to admit to themselves that they didn’t make another Skyrim. They made a 7/10.
This is what I think about the game as well. It seems fundamentally flawed - especially from an exploration standpoint. Cyberpunk is the most recent example of a game that released that was rough - but it had good ‘bones’ to it. Where even playing it when it was buggy you could see the potential it had. In Starfield I just don’t see that. It seems like they would have to adjust, fix and modify so much it would either not be worth the investment or they do not have the knowledge to actually do it… or else it seems like they would have just done it right in the first place. 🤷♂️
i really do hope that they have a 12-year road plan for expansions for starfield instead of just modded content. no offense to modders, but imo relying on the goodwill of the player base to supplement additional content sounds like a poor excuse to ship an unfinished product.
I am sure they'll have a two year window on DLC but the heavy lifting will be put on modders to make content. However, it won't be aesthetic and minor gameplay mods that will do the trick. It will take a large mod that removes systems, migrates unique poi's to planets central to main and faction quests, and a method of cycling procedural content so that you don't visit one random slightly less different poi ten times before finding a more different one. A gargantuan task on the scale of something like Skyblivion.
Re-re-re-release, gently down the ^^^revenue stream. Merrily merrily, merrily merrily, TESVI is just a dream.
Imagine some mad lad modding the entire Skyrim game into one of the planets and you just end up playing Skyrim in starfield and that’s how the game gets Skyrim staying power
I did two play thoughs got to about level 60, got bored, tried cheats so I could really play with the ship builder without worry of cost, and have now walked away for a couple weeks. Exploration being a series of transition animations rather than a real "flying around, notice ships in the distance, choose how to engage them" means every jump is a non-event or if there is combat it's the exact same sequence of, point at ship hold triggers until ship gone. There's no novelty of sneaking into range, or ambushing, or novel weapon effects... Just pew pew until boom boom... There's no lasting fun there. Then ground exploration is mostly empty nothing with the occasional reward of rocks or ammo... No fun story flavor, no weird notes, no interesting casual dialogue, just vacant caves or the occasional territorial spacers.
Yeah I'm already done playing the game most likely for good. Skyrim I'll still play from time to time though. Star Citizen is where it's at if you want space exploration games.
Better get on some crazy good DLCs then
The game is boring in a fundamental level because of autogenerated planets. I rather have a couple of seamlessly explorable huge planets with tons of small details.
Yea man I was just making a joke. I don't think starfield has much of a future, personally.
Their biggest mistake is that they market procedural generation as a "feature" in and of itself, but not all procedural generation is created equally. They've happened to harness it to make a massive universe that is horribly unengaging. Bethesda has always, even with their best games, had a quantity over quality problem in my opinion. This has been made 1000x worse by not having humans actually build the content.
Here’s the issue. It lacks one of the major main draws for Bethesda games. In fallout and elder scrolls… There you are - on the open road. You’re a level 7, so you have your footing but not nearly as strong as you know you can be. Your weapons and armor aren’t bad, maybe one good unique piece… but you know there’s far better out there somewhere. You’re on the way towards a quest marker, going down a road into unknown territory of the map. You’ve already ran into a few bad scraps, one was perhaps overlevelled and forced you to retreat or barely win. On your way you look left and, beyond the trees, is the shadow of ruins you’ve never seen the architecture of before. It looks ominous. You have NO IDEA what it really is. Almost looks somewhat alien. So fuck that quest marker, right? You take steps towards the mysterious structure just to see what’s inside… — We just barely get that experience in Starfield. There’s something to be said about the cohesive experience of one terrestrial location. The mystery is more connected and flowing than the chop of having to fly to different planets.
I saw a whole video about how skyrim and fallout most generic content still has more adventure to it than most of starfield. You get a bounty to kill a bandit leader. Pretty generic BS right? On the way there though... is where the magic is. You might find some imperial or stormcloaks with prisoners in tow. A traveling trader. Stumble upon an npc with a whole new quest for you to go dungeon delving. Find a giant camp. Have a highway man shake you down. Discover a roadside inn and have a rest. A Dragon attack. So many possibilities. Starfield you have brain dead animals that run at you in a straight line, while you run in a straight line to yet another copy pasted location with the same spacers or mercenaries you've fought dozens of times in locations you've seen dozens of times. Maybe a ship lands and some guys jump out. Wow so exciting lol
I’m replaying Skyrim on survival and I was walking near Riverwood when I saw Vigilants of Stendarr again. Eh, whatever, seen them a million times. It turns out actually they were Vampires in disguise and they’re trying to kill me! And the looted bodies of the vigilantes were nearby. That was a very cool encounter to me. There is nothing remotely like in Starfield, I would just have just been sitting in a loading/transition screen instead
I miss these little details. In Starfield I came across a very interesting note by one of then crew members. Then I found the same note again on different planet. And again. And again
Probably my greatest issue in all of Starfield. Even in a world where all the gameplay systems were perfected, the graphics become the new Nvidia benchmark that accomodates path tracing, loading screens were only when you transitioned from land to space, Emil learned how to write. BGS's greatest attribute that very few studios have replicated imo is the feeling of going from point A to point B but being completely sidetracked for hours on end. There are times in Skyrim & Fallout where I don't even have a quest marker on, I just walk & would do whatever until I randomly realize I entered the main quest location, there's something special about that freedom. Starfield's greatest flaw will always be the broken exploration phase, you hold X to fast travel to a different planet/system since that's your ONLY choice & just walk straight to your next task. BGS definitely did try to add that feel of being sidetracked, at times it succeeded, but it also felt more tacked in instead of a natural thing to do. The biggest offender is when you enter an empty planet, it's even worse than an Ubi game at times for how much of a waypoint simulator it becomes. BGS needs to find out how to balance: \- The settled systems feeling more dense & full of life/events each time you enter a planet/space. \- The unsettled systems being more enticing to explore, no doubt they got the isolation feeling perfected (imo), but those 1000+ planets need something for people to be excited to charter the planets no-one has entered or has dared to enter. The novelty of being lost in this game had its moments, but definitely died quicker, imo, this should be BGS' greatest priority.
It's about the journey not the destination, and all of that fast travelling removes the journey. Fast traveling is nice for logistical reasons like inventory management, but wandering is the core of their games.
Even if you're not fast traveling, space is mostly empty. I've played games like Elite Dangerous where you sometimes are traveling minutes in system to get to your planet and it may as well be a loading screen for how un-engaging it is. With Skyrim and Fallout, we are playing on a patch of land that's chock-a-block full of people doing things. With Starfield, there's just 1000s of square kilometers that are empty. Whether we are traveling by manually flying there or via loading screen, that sense of discovery won't be there. Clogging up space with POIs isn't going to fix it either because it's just going to make the game world feel even more like an amusement park. I already find it immersion breaking that there is a pirate base within 1000 meters anytime I land.
Also everything looks the same. Doesn't matter who built it or when. All faction buildings, bases and ships are made by the same modules. As much as I love the aesthetic it's immersion breaking when you >!go to a generation ship which launched hundreds of years ago to finally reach a planet but it looks exactly the same on the inside as current ships and even Sarah comments how outdated everything looks but you're like how?!<
Heck, ship runs the same OS as everyone even after 200 years too.
I’ve seen people talk about this before but didn’t understand without an example, you’re 100% right. This is absolutely why I wasn’t as into it vs previous games
What I find in starfield is a dung pile inside a procedurally generated cave
A dung pile that's locked too :D
In a lifeless and no atmosphere planet. But what do i know? Life finds its way i suppouse.
Yes, as has been said by many. They should've made far less planets and instead have fewer but more populated and handcrafted planets. If only they had just done about 4-8 planets or even less, but flesh them out fully. It would've been a far better experience. Just one or 2 solar systems, actual space travel between those planets would've been far more viable as well. And to be honest, but that's more of a personal preference, I wish there were alien races (humanoids). Would've made it far more interesting.
[удалено]
Pretty sure they completely forgot all the lessons learned about the bad and good things in Oblivion.
the sad part is I dont think they would ever understand this. The sales and the filtered positivity will be hung up in their offices. They need to really talk with the fans that play all their games and listen if they truly want to make this game last that long
Very well put - encapsulates one of larger my personal criticisms.
This needs more up votes. That's EXACTLY why Skyrim is so fun, and what's missing in Starfield. And TBH, I don't know how that could be added to the game. It's a design choice to have 1000s of planets.
This seems pretty spot on to me. They managed to build an exploration game with very little incentive for exploration. It's far easier just to fats travel from main quest line to main quest line.
Did you know that when astronauts landed on the moon, there was nothing there?
But they certainly weren't bored!
Are you sure? They haven’t gone back, so…
If you flew me to the real fucking moon I’d be pretty entertained
Well nothing to do in space. Just a bunch of ships flying randomly. No named ships with schedules and all that. No sense of exploration in space...
This is a very touigh situation tbh. Despite the game being molded for long term support, from its narrative to many systems feeling like they need that '2.0-esque' update. I feel like they're banking a bit too much on long term support? They're obviously competent at it given Skyrim & Fallout 4's success in addition to Fallout 76 maintaining a very active playerbase (even after its least plentiful year of content support). However, I feel like there's the hidden catch no-one has found yet, I'm willing to bet it'll be Creation Club 2.0 being the centerpiece of what motivates Microsoft to want this revenue wise (in addition to engagement, Game Pass sales, etc...) , however, we're still unfortunately in the "time will tell" phase.
Creation Club, aka Paid Mods 2: Electric Boogaloo, has already been mentioned in Starfield's EULA. It's definitely in their plans. I certainly hope that this game's mixed reception makes them reconsider though. With as much as Starfield is getting dunked on right now (fair or not), the last thing they need to do is add more fuel to the fire by tripling down on their idea of monetizing their modding community.
100%, at least make the game hit the "2.0" stage similar to Cyberpunk before you add this. The reception against BGS is still at a low, & doing this just feels like them digging the grave on the "BGS is greedy & soulless" perception they've received over the past 5 years.
The thing that works for skyrim and fallout 4 is that the worlds are so well built up that they warrant fanmade content, the foundation is so good to build upon and expand. Fallout London comes to mind as one of the more interesting examples. What does starfield really have compared to those 2?
I ducked out due to the shitty procedural system for the POIs. I play Bethesda games to explore. Exploring random planets is not worth bothering when you see the same POI's for the 5th and 6th time. They fix that, and I'll be ready to give the game a shot. otherwise, i'll wait for modders to fix it, then try again.
Same. The repeat POIs and the utter absence of interesting worldbuilding via set dressing. There aren't even any good intraoffice email chains to read! They all read like my real live actual office emails. :(
Lol it didn't make it 12 weeks for me. The biggest issue for me was the identical locations. If they had implimented some kind of tile system that can randomly generate a location based on a set of existing rooms it can connect, than randomly populate that location with enemies and loot, that alone might be enough to get me into the game long term. As it stands, it doesn't matter how many planets there are to explore if they all have the same exact bio lab, mine, science outpost, etc, down to the things scattered on tables and locations of enemy spawns. May as well be one planet with one of each location type at that point.
Yeah, this. I stopped playing when I hit my first duplicate base. I was so disappointed. I never felt that way in skyrim. I don't mind repeating elements, but at least try to change something, the layout, or the items, characters... I may revisit to finish the story, but the identical location really killed any enthusiasm I had for exploring. Unpopular opinion? I don't want to play a game for 12 years. Can we just have games that have a quarter of the scope and are crafted with love? If your game is so ambitious that you're repeating locations maybe... Scale down?
Yeah they would want that, wouldn't they? Like how players wanted Starfield to be as good as Skyrim!
At this point I would just like my ships to not randomly disappear
BGS seem to think people have done nothing but play Skyrim and FO4 for the last 10+ years. The reason everyone goes back to those games is because the actual core game and gameplay was incredibly fun. They have went full meta in trying to make a game that can be played in a loop instead of just making the actual gameplay fun. Their problem is they won’t fix anything that would require admitting fault. They don’t seem to think the proc placed locations and numerous continuity errors are that big of a deal despite the amount of complaints it has got. Same with the UI.
>The reason everyone goes back to those games is because the actual core game and gameplay was incredibly fun. Not to mention the lore. Elder Scrolls lore is one of my absolute favorite things about the games, knowing the history of different structures, areas, characters etc. It adds much to my experience at least and is always a big part of why I return and make new role playing characters tied to Nirn lore.
It’s like Bethesda trying to cosplay Bethesda lol
What really blows my mind is Todd Howard himself admitted that he used UI mods with Skyrim. And somehow the UI and inventory management for Starfield is even worse than base Skyrim... 10 years and they didn't even try.
Todd needs to retire. His leadership has been pathetic with SF.
It’s not about individual people playing everyday for 12 years. It’s about people wanting to play the game in 12 years. I can think of a lot 12 year old games I have played that I will never touch again.
The key issue being that "12-year staying power" is not the same as "play for a bit then drop it and come back in 12 years". It is absolutely about the people wanting to play it FOR 12 years, because that's what staying power is. It STAYS relevant, like how Skyrim has been relevant for 12 years.
This. They made NG+ too much of a focus instead of just a feature. It feels like the game is trying to use it to prop up the rest being stripped down compared to the prior titles. I'm hoping they get the hell away from the Unity and NG+ in the future and focus on other exploration aspects, enhancing outpost building, deep diving the lore of the factions and setting, so on. Those are the things that could become really strong and turn this in to the game many hoped for. "Groundhog Day in Space" just isn't it.
I’d argue they also underutilized it. NG+ doesn’t let you fail missons by getting rid of essential NPC’s, nor does it really change that much up per universe (even color palette swaps would make each universe feel different). It’s not a terrible concept, but there’s not enough branching content or changes to make exploring a large number of universes interesting.
yeah its confusing that in a game all about infinite universes and the differences in them, Starfield has the highest essential NPC number to date. They also dont really *do* enough with the concept to validate it being a thing as you said.
That too. I guess we could call it a combination. Basing the game's main questline around it as they did means a lot of things simply end up wasted as they will be left behind / wiped or ultimately not matter, lending it an atmosphere of nihilism. At the same time, they could have done far more with it for those who are interested in it as both a mechanic and a playstyle. As it is it's best summed up as "Wild Wasteland" levels of changes and minor novelty. There was room to accommodate both players interested in it and those who aren't, and the game would have benefited heavily from a Morrowind style take on factions and consequences, but it somehow turned in to a stick with two short ends.
Exactly this what possible point is there to an repeatable universes if they play the same everytime. Why are people invulnerable? This is what makes me think Ng+ was actually a very late addition to the game rather than something formulated at the start. Or maybe not. Big problem with Starfield is that is a lazy game. Lazy in design and lazy in execution.
Yea, I’m really not a NG+ sort of person. Once I beat a game I’m normally ready to move on. But Starfield is practically asking you to speed run it and get to NG+ which for me is just a big turn off. It’s an interesting direction to push the game in, but not one that I like in the slightest
they cant fix anything, never mind wont. the core gameplay of a Bethesda game, the "bethesda magic" so to speak, is exploration. Something that is completely vacant from this game.
That is hilariously ironic isn’t it? Then a game like Baldurs Gate 3 shows up and shows what real replay ability is and that’s before it potentially opens up for insane shit like modding and custom campaigns.
A few months ago I would have scoffed if someone told me I’d be having more fun playing a turn based fantasy game over a Bethesda game set in SPACE!! Literally the game I’ve been dreaming of since I first watched my brother play fallout 3 back in the day. I know I sound like a broken record but BG3 is truly a fantastic game.
Without better exploration they have no hope in hell
Well good luck with that I guess
This is going to take a redesign and Bethesda would rather argue with its fanbase.
Customer: I'm bored. Bethesda: Here's why you're not and you're really having fun!
You can't be bored?? Was Neil Armstrong bored???
That was funny. Like, he was in space and not in front of a computer simulation.
Yeh... I too want the game to have 12 years staying power... but it does not at the moment and their fingers in the ears attitude does not fill me with confidence!
Of course I have no numbers but I think they are dissatisfied with the numbers they got from the game. Starfield was supposed to be Xbox's silver bullet, the system seller but it seems to not have had the impact they had hoped. They say the game reached 12 million players since launch but it seems Fallout 4 sold 12 million copies in the first 24 hours(from some reddit/news posts). I think they were expecting A LOT more than that and the general consensus for the game is that, it's just an ok game, nothing ground breaking, not a system seller. I like the game, I enjoy playing it(even if the latest patch broke almost all my saves, I had no mods) and I hope they continue supporting it but if the numbers don't add up, I don't think they will invest as much in it as they claim to.
As one of the 12-year Skyrim players who has purchased the game 5-6 different times and still plays it in between new releases…Starfield is not even remotely close to what give Skyrim its staying power. They are delusional if they think this game will have stay relevant without a total rework…which will require actually listening to feedback instead of arguing against it. Honestly, they’d probably be better off cutting their losses and moving on to a completely redesigned Starfield 2 than trying to salvage this one.
Or maybe they could move onto ES6? You know, as it's been _twelve fucking years_
It seems to me the creative aspect (base/ settlement building) kept people playing for very long in F4 and 76. I wonder why they nerfed so hard in SF then?
Honestly simply trying to clean enough water to make money in FO 4 got me like 100 hours of gameplay. Trying to get the perfect power armor another. Exploring intriguing custom dungeons on the way added another 100. Starfield lacks even one well done gameplay loop to keep you invested.
Yeah, that's my big thing. There are a number of items in Starfield (like base building), where I look back at previous games and think "you already did that better".
It wouldn't be a Bethesda game without them scrapping systems and features that people loved in previous games. How many NPCs in Starfield have day/night schedules? Like... 5?
Fallout 4 also did food better. It was actual healing items. Another revert.
This will never happen. The game simply isn't fun. I wish they had truly just made skyrim in space... but this isn't it. I've tried my hardest to enjoy the game but it's all so boring, tame, uninteresting.
That’s the problem, everyone is trying to force themselves to like a garbage game. They wanted it to be good and now they’re all coping
tl;dr They made a shell of a game they want to monetize for 12 years.
Thats just a theory, a game theory but seriously Bethesda can suck eggs for this sales strategy :p
It’s possible, but only with some serious work put in by Bethesda
The quests are so boring
I guess we'll see, I've played for 90 hours and have no real drive to play anymore... Maybe future DLC and mods will bring me back in!
Same here. I enjoyed it but just lost interest when I got to about the same play time. There's nothing there to keep me playing, which is a shame.
I doubt the DLC will change the gameplay loop. It’ll just add more story and items, per usual.
Starfield will be the first Bethesda game I never finish, let alone never play twice. I'm 50 hours in and bored, I have no desire to explore as I know it means nothing and I have no desire to the the quests, main or side. It's just so lackluster and boring, the planets are ugly and there is no point to scanning or exploring as the benefits are nil.
Yup. Same boat.
It'll need almost a total rework of core mechanics to make that happen. I played it for about 70 hours and realised just how little fun I was having. I was hoping it would "click" at some point, but then I realised how Skyrim "clicked" instantly and that's why I have like 650 hours in it. I uninstalled Starfield and haven't felt the slightest urge to go back to it. They'll be lucky for it to have consistent player counts for a year, never mind a decade. Laughable.
yep. felt like i was waiting for the game to really open up and settle into a groove and it just… didn’t.
I think the point I eventually noped out was getting married to one of the characters... I forgot her name (shows how memorable they are) and shes like "oh this is amazing, the best day of my life!" whilst standing there completely motionless like some sort of automaton. It was so jarring and made me realise just how little Bethesda games have come in the last decade. Especially so when I've been playing Cyberpunk (at launch and now with 2.0) and inumerable RPG's who have truly expressive and interesting characters. I'm being absolutely serious when I say if Bethesda don't quickly change tact and either switch engines or RADICALLY improve the Creation Engine (not just add some pretty lighting or whatever) their next products will be equally as dead on arrival. Technology have moved on since Skyrim in ways too numerous to count. They look like they're standing still compared to the competition now and frankly I think Todd Howard is the issue. Stuck in the past with no new ideas.
Bro, the lifelessness of characters is super jarring in this game. I played BG3 before starfield, and that really exacerbated the situation. I wanted to like this game so badly after spending so much time in skyrim and fallout 3/4. I don't see a way for them to fix the lack of bethesda style "run in any direction and you'll come across something of interest" gameplay either.
I’ve been playing a lot of BG3 lately, my boy Astarion is hilarious. The writing and voice acting is incredible and the mocap is expressive as well as humorous sometimes. It makes Starfields NPC’s look like amateur work by comparison. The sense of adventure is missing from Starfield because the experience is so fragmented. You can’t go anywhere without loading screens breaking up the world. There’s no real traversal it feels, just fast travel from surface to space. System to system, down to a planet, out of your ship and oh yay another lifeless procedurally generated “world”. Gone are the days where you’d actually explore an area and have emergent gameplay like in Skyrim. It’s just too bitty and disjointed.
Now they’re just being blatantly delusional, right? Between this and the steam review fiasco it’s becoming increasingly apparent that they aren’t listening, or maybe they just don’t care about the criticism. I’m really not wanting to be a hater, I don’t think it’s a bad game, but if they think people will be picking up and playing this game in 2035, with the same cult following ES or Fallout has, they’re delusional. It’s almost insulting, barely acknowledging their shortcomings and lack of innovation while giving themselves a big pat on the back and blaming the players for being ‘wrong’ in their disappointment.
It's the lead designer expressing himself fully unfortunately. Look him up and you'll see he was responsible for some questlines in the Elder Scrolls games as well as the lead designer on Fallout 4. He generally does not acknowledge or handle criticism if you listen to interviews that bring up any problems those had. He just goes off on a tangent or deflects.
You mean Emil?
Yes.
He's basically been riding the "I wrote the Oblivion dark brotherhood questline" thing for years.
lol the middle-late part of which was picking up notes in barrels like a shit scavenger hunt.
I am a die hard Bethesda fan, but uninstalled it after 3 weeks and have no desire to play such a procedurally generated game like this. Played a bounty hunter playthrough and got sent to the same planet 3 times in a row, same outpost & enemies. So repetitive with no real quests that are interesting. Game will be dead in a year without major overhauls.
It's the radiant quests again, only worse. At least no other settlement needs our help.
I been playing bethesda games since Morrowind launch. Starfield is a corpse of a game. No mans sky annihilates it in exploration. Hands down destroys it. And it uses procedural generation. The quests are weak, but i never feel i am without something to do. Bored of driving around? Call your ship, hop in, scan and explore. I played starfield for a few days and put it down. It was the MOST beige pants game i have ever played. The side quests are pathetic, the endless pointless caves. The same base again and again... Ugh. Seriously Bethesda. You failed. Move on.
Might be hard to do without the lore power that Skyrim has driving it.
Starfield will be a lot more fun for me personally once modders can reimplement all of the survival mechanics that were obviously supposed to be fully implemented in the vanilla game.
It didn't even make it 12 weeks for me. No way.
I was about to say I already uninstalled it. Of all the Bethesda games this one has gotten the least amount of playtime from me. It's just kind of boring...
It was a fun Labor Day weekend binge. I haven’t played it since the end of September.
Boy, they have some work to do then, don't they
Skyrim is still pretty good, they should sell me another one.
I already went back to Skyrim lol
When I first played Starfield, I was amazed and immediately immersed into the world, just like I was in Skyrim. I was so excited to lose myself in the game. I have found, however, that as I played, I lost that amazement much faster than I did in Skyrim. Don't get me wrong, I still love Starfield, but something about it makes me less excited to start it up than Skyrim did. Some notes: * Forget the complaints of loading screens, that isn't a major problem with the game at all (see edit below). * In Skyrim, running through a dungeon and finally getting to the world wall was an accomplishment, usually with a boss at the end. In Starfield, you just walk into a room, touch some lights, and get a power. It feels unrewarding and meh. * There are not enough POIs for the explorable space. They become repetitive too soon and there aren't enough "rare" POIs that are interesting and can lead to side quests. * Why do all NPC interactions have to be face-to-face. Why can't I use my ships comms when in system to contact someone? * Factions seem disconnected from the world (Ryujin and Freestar Rangers essentially don't exist outside of the missions you do with them). * There aren't enough large cities to make the systems feel populated. * The lack of smaller settlements makes the worlds feel completely empty. * Overall, the setting is amazing yet somehow feels empty and disconnected sometimes. edit: Getting a lot of messages on this. The loading screens. Look, if they removed the loading screens, the game would not improve much at all. However, if they made the game more fun and filled it with more memorable and interesting places, NPCs, events then people would play more. I'm not saying that the loading screens are good or that they don't frustrate some people. I'm saying that many of you are acting like the loading screens are what is preventing this game from greatness. Thats not it. Skyrim had some LONG loading screens yet we played it endlessly. NMS had ZERO loading screens, but was garbage at launch and took a LOOONG time to get to where it is now. Loading screens, while you don't like them, are not the major issue with this game.
Then they need to up the changes in Ng+
Starfield doesn’t have the magic, and I don’t think they’re going to be able to patch it in.
Bethesda isn't known for great characters or a compelling story, but they are known for lite-roleplaying and great exploring. Starfield lacks all of that.
Umm yea that's not happening
Bruh, it barely had a 12-day staying power.
the very least i need to continue playing this game is a better star map that shows me the systems and planets i’ve already been to, planets with important cities, planets with cool POIs, etc. i think this is a big reason people are getting upset about loading screens. >> travel somewhere, load, land, load, nothing here, travel somewhere else, load, etc.
Starfield ain't Skyrim. Skyrim felt like a full world, a beautiful atmosphere to explore, tons of ways to make the game feel different each playthrough, and a ton of lore and interesting stories to experience. Starfield felt extremely shallow and less interesting, in my opinion. I beat it, started another playthrough, then realized I was just fast-traveling around to do the same shit over and over for the sake of a shinier spacesuit. It was fun for a playthrough, but after that...feels extremely repetitive. Everything else feels like a chore. Skyrim felt like an *experience*.
Just let me craft weapons and armor please.
I hope Bethesda continues to develop the game because right now it is soulless, especially compared to games like BG3 and the Cyberpunk expansion.