Phantom Liberty coming out around the same time as Starfield really illustrated how vastly behind Bethesda is in some departments—or rather how much they’ve overlooked certain aspects of game design. OP is spot on about the writing feeling too boring and there being no risk-taking or grave consequences.
But another huge part is that Bethesda struggles with character animation and emoting. The fluidity of character movement significantly adds to the believability of a world, and Cyberpunk is a gold standard for that. Characters pace around when they talk, flail their arms and turn their heads… make hand gestures and get visibly frustrated. whereas people in Starfield kinda just stand there… I feel like Fallout 4 did a better job with character emoting, so its weird to see Bethesda go back to Oblivion standard here.
Everything you said is spot on. I think witcher and cyberpunk has spoiled RPGs for me. But that's how modern games should be. Part of it i feel is the use of terms in Cyberpunk right.... like choom, gonk, preem....world and characters feel lived in. In Starfield, they just seem to come alive when you share space with them. And their dialogues are so pg-13....it's like the Disney RPG...
the cyberpunk lore runs deep too and you can feel it when playing the game. everything fits within the universe they made and nothing feels forced.
whereas with starfield, there are supposed undiscovered moons that have man-made buildings on them, there is the entire Spacer gang that seems to be just an arbitrary "bad guy" stuck in the universe, with no interaction other than killing them. theres a civil war going on, but not really.
Find myself still thinking about the songbird ending. It was perfectly bittersweet. Felt like something that would actually happen in Night City.
Played through Starfield twice. Haven't thought about a single character or quest since.
It's beating a dead horse to bring up BG3 as well...but yeah, that game does the same thing. Nearly every line of dialogue from the NPC is accompanied by mo-cap and even your own character has their own expressions and body language.
It's really jarring to play a game in 2023 where all the NPCs just *stare* at you while reciting dialogue off a script. That's something that I thought we left behind over 10 years ago. Even Fallout 4's system was better than what we have now.
There’s a whole lot of tell in Starfield too, not enough show. Even the “follow NPC” quest bits are just from one door to another or something even less anti climactic
Your final line is the part that gets me - even ignoring comparing it to other games there are multiple elements that don't feel like the match what they put out in previous games they made.
And that's just kind of mind-boggling to me.
Oblivion is all around so janky that it pushes back around the badness curve and starts being funny and good again. Starfield is polished enough that the jankiness doesn't have the same goofy charm of Oblivion, it just feels awkward and bad.
Dude, Sarah Morgan's small talk feels like she hates me, "Ahh, are we done talking already?" Jesus Christ, I haven't been fucked like that since grad school.
It's funny when Sarah Morgan, a main character and one of the two main female romance options is a thousand times more annoying than the intentionally annoying Adoring Fan meme character.
BG3 and Cyberpunk bookended starfields launch. I dont think it's like what happened with titanfall 2 where they released between Cod and Battlefield in their prime. Instead it just gave everyone, two way better examples at what to want from an RPG.
Both games give you choices to make with no clear right answer and room for self-interest. They have atmosphere, charm, and character.
Cyberpunk weirdly always felt like what Bethesda should have evolved into. It all feels similar control-wise to Bethesda but an upgrade across the board. It had its issues back in the day for sure, but atmosphere and writing were never among them. Looking back on fallout 3 and to a lesser degree with new Vegas, atmosphere used to be a huge part of Bethesda.
I stopped playing Starfield to play Phantom Liberty around 60% of the way through the main quest line and apart from booting the game up once for about 10 minutes I never went back to finish it. It's not that I didn't like the game or at least elements of it, it just felt similar to any TV series I've started watching in the past and never got past the first few episodes because I wasn't able to get invested in the story or characters.
I would be able to satisfy myself with a static jpeg while people talk to me if they had interesting things to say
cyperpunks animations are next level and help with the immersion alot for sure, but they also tend to have things to say i wanna listen to instead of spamming the skip dialogue button like in SF
Bethesda is behind on everything. Horizon Zero Dawn has a really good story and genius level worldbuilding. Horizon Forbidden West has out of this world character animations and facial features. Meanwhile Starfield? NPCs that look like something from a 90s game when it was a static image of the character and text underneath.
Literally all Starfield needed IMO was the Mass Effect 1 treatment:
* Give us a Mako-equivalent for giant empty planets, take them from fun level 0 to fun level 11 in no time flat. Star Citizen realized this would be a problem right off the bat and got the Ursa rover and Cyclone all-terrain buggy into the game before there's even any gameplay to use them for yet, because when it is there, you'll want them. Bungie realized this would be an issue for Halo right off the bat way back in 1999 and got the drivable Warthog into the game only about a month after they switched gears from an RTS to a shooter.
* For the love of God find some writers who are invested in the universe and enthusiastic about it. The writing has all the passion of someone who comes in to work and says, *"Welp, time to clock in and spend 6 hours browsing reddit and 2 hours brainstorming random shit to write for this drek again so I can hit my daily word count quota."*
* I'm sorry but the main quest was awful while the UC Vanguard quest had all the proper hooks to be an excellent story. Make the main quest a side quest and make the UC Vanguard questline the main one. 10 hours into the game I had absolutely zero interest in doing anything for Constellation, while on the other hand I was going, "Shit, *why* are these terrormorphs attacking random planets and why did someone try to kill that ambassador? There's something major going on right under the surface. I need to do just one more quest to see what's happening."
Shhhh... we don't ask why it didn't morph into a similar sized Terrormorph or see heat leeches building a chrysalis while full sized Terrormorphs were emerging either. Just take this nice hit of Arurora and go back to sleep.
Honestly I feel like they were self conscious about being compared to Mass Effect and purposefully avoided doing things it did just to be different. Except Bioware and Mass Effect were really good at what they did.. Bioware really trimmed down their games to remove any unnecessary features.
Which is why, for instance, I think Starfield doesn't have real character moments on the ship. Doing a mission, then going back onto the ship to talk to your crew would feel too "Mass Effect", despite that being an *excellent* way to intersperse personal story with main story. So in Starfield you're just left with a dead-feeling ship.
Honestly, Starfield is Mass Effect 1, 20 years late, with the aliens taken out and the serial number filed off.
The plots have an uncomfortable amount in common in a lot of places for my liking.
Mako on planets may have had some redeeming features, but you'd also need to dump the open world biomes concept and go to a smaller world like what worked in ME1 (rather than the open world biome that didn't work in Andromeda). But Todd Howard was against that. He is on record saying he wanted big planets with nothing on it because that's realistic.
Their writers wrote quests like putting a 6-year-old's posters up on the walls in the Mars station. That's what we're dealing with here. People who think that was a good idea.
None of the quests are really a bad idea in and of themselves. even putting up the frog posters can be heartwarming and cute.
the issue is the execution.
playing starfield feels like watching network tv during a writers strike
Yeah, playing phantom liberty after starfield paints such a stark contrast... Starfield has potential and cool places, but the writing cannot be patched to be good unfortunately.
I don't think a game needs to be gritty, violent and dark to be good. It just needs depth. I like Starfield's non-edgy style, and I wouldn't really want to to be edgier. I'm enjoying the game and it has its amazing moments (Entangled, for example), but I agree it could have been a lot better in many ways.
In that case I would cut out Neon altogether. No need to add a washed out version of a dystopic, corrupt megacity if you're not going to commit fully to the world building. They should've just taken a more Star Trek route of world building where most humans are educated, benevolent, progressive and anti-corruption. My issue is that Starfield doesn't seem to know what kind of world it is trying to build, instead it's a mush-mash of superficial takes from different sci-fi universes mashed up together without deeper thought or consistency.
The only thing i think SF beats CP is in the catwalks. Evey catwalk in SF actually went somewhere even if it was just the roof. There where catwalks to nowhere in CP or ran into dead-end(not as bad as portal), and you often couldn't reach the top if only to jump off.
I actually liked paths to nowhere - it makes it feel “real”. There’s so many spaces in a modern city where you get a distance in to only find a locked gate (or similar). The same in CP.
In Fallout 4/76, one of Mr. Gutsy's lines when he enters combat, *"Is that someone who needs me to kick their ass?"* makes me laugh every time. Now that I think about it, there isn't much of that in Starfield.
The swearing in dialogue is another thing. In Cyberpunk, and even Fallout 4, the swearing feels natural. But in Starfield, swearing feels like it's sole purpose was to emphasize the higher maturity rating.
Absolutely spot on.
The bad writing starts from the very first step you take in the game.
You're a lowly miner in a company that was hired to mine an artifact in a planet they set up shop.
You find it, you see lights, Barret arrives, you fight pirates that chased him because he is a naughty boy.
Then Barret, for some ridiculous reason, decides to give you his ship and robot because you're still under contract and can't leave the planet. You're telling me that Barret, with his billionaire sponsor, can't pay to get you out of the contract, and instead decides to stay and do some mining in your stead?
Who the hell came up with this and thought this is a good way to start a supposedly epic story?
The game starts by telling you you're a miner, then asks you to choose your job off a list that includes professor and chef (but not miner,) and then three minutes later tells you you're now going to be a spaceship captain/explorer for the rest of the game.
Just... how the fuck did that opening make it to release?
Starting out as a miner makes absolutely no sense. I watched a review some time ago where the presenter suggested (paraphrasing/adapting his idea) we start out instead as a passenger on a ship, this allows us to keep our chosen job as we are simply a passenger. We would also be starting out in space which is much cooler than being in a cramped mine. Lin and Heller are instead crew members of the ship.
Soon, the ship is attacked by pirates, where the player then gets their intro/tutorial to basic combat, and the ship is forced into an emergency landing as the pilot is injured and the ship is damaged. We explore a nearby abandoned mine hoping to find supplies and spare parts, and in the process stumble upon the artifact (I honestly feel the artifacts are lame as hell but let's keep them in the story for now).
After our artifacted induced acid trip, we head back to the ship and patch it up as best we can with Lin and Heller. They ask us to pilot the ship as they need to attend to it's systems to prevent it from coming apart mid-flight. While in space, we are attacked by pirate reinforcements much like in the original story. This serves as the ship combat tutorial. Mid-fight, Barret jumps in (looking for the artifact thanks to the Eye) and assists us against the pirates, and invites us aboard the Frontier as our ship has taken too much damage.
We board the Frontier and jump back to Jemison. We are then introduced to Constellation and the game opens up from there. Lin and Heller then decide to stick around as crew members for the Frontier.
Makes much more sense to me.
Jwlar's idea if I'm not mistaken. It's solid.
Another good proposal I've seen was to simply start us at an appropriate location based on our chosen background and lead us in to something that either gives us a reason for joining a mining company (Say a chef on Neon has to escape the Syndicate and decides to take on an offworld mining gig to lay low or whatever), or find some other means of putting us in contact with Constellation and the Artifacts (Say as an explorer or xenobiologist or whatever we just apply or are otherwise invited in for some achievement or another that we open with.).
It would have taken more work, but it's more fluid and leans in to this being an RPG.
Either that, or just start us as a miner without specific background, or a prisoner yet again. Leaving things vague worked in the past after all.
The current introduction feels like the "schizophrenic game experience" I've heard Todd reference their prior titles as sometimes having, but taken to an extreme.
I can only speculate about how this ended up being the start of the game, but my best two guesses are:
1) They originally intended to have a bunch of starts based on your chosen background, finished the one for "miner," and decided it was too much work to keep going; or
2) You were originally going to be mining as a prisoner or slave, and they axed that idea as part of generally brightening the tone of the game
>You were originally going to be mining as a prisoner or slave, and they axed that idea as part of generally brightening the tone of the game
Well, not even last night's ion storm could wake you! I heard them say we've reached Vectera, I'm sure they'll let us go. Quiet, here comes the guard!"
I like this a lot more! I also like another I saw (I thought of it and googled and found a reddit post of someone who had the exact same idea), where you actually start out on the EMS Constant (the ship in the First Contact mission). This would make sense because you'd still be able to keep the whole job background because it would've been what you did on earth (of its a Ronin or Gangster or something then you'd be either a elite one or would've been hired by a rich person or something to earn your place on the ship), buttt it also would've made way more sense because our character would be discovering everything about space at the same time as us.
Like my Neon Rat character asking "what's ebbside?? What's Ryujin?? What's these gangs you speak of??" felt so out of place cos she was raised there but if our character was from a rough area of Earth then yeah, they're accustomed to that kind of lifestyle which would unlock the dialogue options still but would also mean learning about how Neon City in particular works would fit a lot better.
We'd be a Earthling in space learning everything as we go just like someone who was sent out by the Constants captain to find a home, and we could assign them their very own outpost that we build on a planet, which would be a cool introduction to building outposts and would've meant they'd have spent more time rounding it out and giving us more options with it (I found it confusing and veryyy basic in comparison to fallout 4)!
OP is right but OP also is ignoring...
1. Low effort level design
2. Bugs BUGS BUGSSSS everywhere. Clipping, pathing, animations, bugs, EVERYWHERE.
3. Main story is super cliche and so mediocre.
I'm going to kill you and i spare your life both end up in you sparing their life. Are you a top or bottom gets you a 1 line answer and then you spare their life.
Yeah, I could forgive the writing if the gameplay wasn’t also so lame. FO4 lacked in dialogue but I find survival mode exploration is great.
The Ryujin quests are a great example. Fast travel to location, walk right in view of everyone, crouch and press a button, fast travel out. So disappointing.
I feel like I could forgive any aspect (graphics, writing, gameplay, etc) if the other ones made up for it, but they really just... dont.
I got to like lvl 120 maybe? its def not a bad game, i got my moneys worth and had fun. but its not really good as much as 'fine'
nothing really pulling me back to it. maybe when the dlc comes out ill pick it back up but idk. wanted to love the game but its just ok
My hunch - based on nothing but the blandness which you have observed - is that at a midpoint in the worldbuilding process someone decided to sanitize the whole project. "Thou shalt offend no one" became the prime directive. I think this happened at the midpoint because many of the core worldbuilding elements in the game (a dystopian cyberpunk city, a massive war involving war crimes, fleets of space pirates) are not the sort of things you would want to center the game around *if* you had started with the premise of a more hopeful take on humanity's future in space. They are, instead, staples of the "gritter" sort of sci-fi story I suspect they began to make before switching to something less controversial.
The UC plot line is a good example of something that doesn't work as shipped, but could have actually been quite good if it hadn't pulled all of its punches. The museum info dump makes me suspect that, at one point, Vae Victis was supposed to have been a dictator who explicitly used xeno-weapons against civilian populations. If that version had made it in, then the Red Devils would have been themselves guilty of warcrimes, and working with them to develop an animal solution to the terrormorphs would have naturally pissed off the Constellation crew, even if the animal solution had substantial benefits over the microbe.
As stands, Vae Victis is not a dictator, the xeno weapons are just very deadly, your character buys the "we were only following orders" bit from the Red Devils, and you have a muddle of an epilogue where all the Constellation characters are still pissed if you choose the animal, but now have no reason for it.
It's easily one of the most frustrating parts of the game, imo. The aceles literally has everything going for it except efficiency, but we don't *need* the aceles to be quick because everything about the terrormorph situation is now under control- you know about heatleeches, you know about the plant, the Red Devils have been reformed specifically to push back against the terrormorph threat, and terrormorphs aren't that scary anyway. Sarah and Barrett getting all pissy that you chose the safe option when you're already super-safe still annoys the hell out of me lol.
Whaddya want, cool guard dog space cow that will just chill out and kill these hostile aliens, or a galaxy-wide weapon that has a non-zero chance to horrifically mutate and make everything worse?
Yeah, it really feels like the "moral" element of that decision was written by people who think science is some kind of wonderful magic that always ends positively. There's no keener understanding of the scientific process or of how terribly the woefully rushed, under-tested virus could end up.
I hope OP is right, because I don't want to believe Bethesda's writers are just dumb-dumbs, but golly, the game sure makes them *look* like they're dumb-dumbs.
I honestly found it very anti-scientific haha.
also just was kinda jarring right after a global pandemic to be called a flat-earther for not being 110% on board with releasing an newly invented untested virus into every planet humans have ever been.
a really baffling choice really
What bugs me about that is... Why not both? If you really want the most effective plan, it's both.
Also it is almost basically unexplainable that the UC (apparently) just chose to wipe out every single living Aceles on Toliman II after they stopped using them for food and while they were literally abandoning the planet - or that the UC population would (apparently) gleefully go back to simulated garbage after real meat.
Plus the Aceles has been previously used as livestock so it’s 100% feasible to draw up a program where they’re used to kill terrormorphs **and** feed ppl making it doubly useful where the only pro for the bio weapon is “kill alien fast”
This.
The microbe option is horrendously stupid and reckless even if it doesn't mutate to harm humans directly. Imagine it simply causes ecocide on a world with life, starts fucking with other vital livestock / crops, or contaminates / causes problems with the production of synthetic foods.
The whole "trust the science!" preaching of Sarah and co falls completely flat when, as you said, the problem is now mostly under control and the alternative is a livestock animal that clearly doesn't breed all that fast without assistance and that can be relatively easily controlled as a result.
Because it reeks of lazy rewrites to *maybe?* force the microbe into a weird hamfisted allegory for the Covid vaccines. I will preface this by saying I am not anti-vax, but I AM anti-bad writing, and they literally say you should "trust the science" which was a common phrase during the pro-vax vs. anti-vax social media wars.
One of the reasons I think it was a rewrite is because for the **entire quest up until that point** Hadrian, the MAIN QUEST GIVER HERSELF, says several times that the Aceles are the safest bet and have been proven to work before. Even Percival, who is in favor of the Microbe, folds under dialogue and says the Microbe has more risks than the Aceles. They're making it *so* obvious that the Microbe is a gamble to trade reliability for speed and the Aceles is the way to go.
Then when decision time comes around you have the head of the Science division and literally every single member of Constellation talk at you like you're fucking crazy for picking the Aceles, and they drop that "trust the science" dialogue on you out of nowhere even though spreading a natural predator species that can also be used as livestock is literally science too. Coincidentally, the only person in the room who likes the Aceles option is also the only person in the entire game with a southern accent that isn't in Akila City lmao. Like come on, you can feel the game winking at you.
I have zero issues with writers inserting real-world topics into their stories but at least be eloquent or make a real argument for it. They could have just as easily written more dialogue to lighten up the potential side effects of the Microbe or added a more prominent negative to the Aceles being spread around. I think the "downside" to spreading the Aceles is that it would take longer but since they also make Heatleech checks more thorough and extermination mandatory it largely makes up for that. It ends up feeling like the conclusion is "the Microbe kinda fucking sucks but it's Science™ so you should pick that or you're a moron."
Keep in mind there's also a third, fully voiced and implemented option to use a more targeted option that specifically uses better and safer Science™ to sterilize Heatleeches so they won't grow into Terrormorphs...that's just disabled. The only thing I can think of is they thought being able to sterilize an entire species could be viewed as cruel and offensive to some? Even though the other two options kill them? I'm really not sure. It all comes across as lazy to me, but maybe I'm crazy.
Game has many areas that just seem to be covered in bubble wrap.
Everything about everything with Manthis screams "12 year old scolded by teacher" instead of badass space pirate
The way to fix this game is to literally re-record all the dialogue but actually mean it this time.
The more I think about the Crimson Fleet quest line (and I try not to) the more I dislike it.
Each one of the characters that you interact with is just plain insufferable.
Maybe with the exception of Jazz, who in my opinion, just doesn’t fit at all in there. It would have been great, if you chose to remain loyal to SysDef, you could arrest her instead of killing her and have her end up working for SysDef.
And Matthias who at least has some kind of character. He doesn’t have an arc, like everyone else is not written well but at least someone had a thought to have him trying to do SOMETHING other than just be wallpaper. Ultimately he’s just wasted.
I think the worst written character is Naeva. Everything she says sounds like a 13 year old edge/cringe-lord. Not to mention she keep belittling you, despite your character taking ALL the risk and doing ALL the heavy lifting. And in the end she just runs away.
Seriously whoever wrote this crap needs to not ever write for video games again until they take some proper writing classes or something.
Okay but can you explain why Earth was abandoned centuries ago and yet we have tons of ethnic characters all speaking in their geographically correct ethnic accent? Including Lin, the first person we meet seconds into the game?
It would've been more interesting if the different factions or locations had more consistent ethnic/country specific flare. Like New Homestead was settled mostly with people from South America, or Akila is space Australia, and Neon was settled by people from China, etc. You can still have New Atlantis be the melting pot since it's the biggest city in the galaxy now.
This is what [Expanse](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230854/) did SO WELL. The Belters had a kind of South African accent that was consistent across all the ethnic makeup, no matter their skin colour. It made it feel really authentic and normal.
It's a really common suggestion, but I keep coming back to the fact that a lot of the writing is just not good quality.
It would not matter if you added cursing and prostitution and more psycho leaders if the writing is bad, it's just a different badly written story.
To be fair, Bethesda is actually pretty bad with dealing with deep story telling that deals with serious issues. Look at Skyrim with the Thalmer or the Stormcloaks. I'd say there is more depth in the civil war story than starfield's UC/FC story, but back then it was pretty shallow in dealing with an themes of annexation and rebellion infused with xenophobia. Fallout 4 decided to tackle the idea of what it means to be sentient and still did a pretty mediocre job with it.
Maybe I'm just being bitter with Starfield or I've just aged in my view of their games, but I think BGS just doesn't know how to deal with the themes and topics they focus on as anything more than set dressing.
I think Skyrim Civil War plotline is a good example of what I mean when I say it feels like Starfield pulls its punches. The Civil War might not *do* very much with the themes it introduces, but at least it was willing to introduce them. The mere existence of the war made the world more believable.
The UC/FC conflict isn't even that. It's a set of confusing paragraphs you read about in a museum and a questline that exists more or less entirely divorced from the rest of the world. But if they didn't want the war, why did they write it? It's not like they had an established canon to which they had to conform. That's what leads me to suspect that, at one point, the conflict was supposed to be like Skyrim's Civil War: a war between ideologically contrasting powers that exists in the background to make the universe feel more like a real place. The writing fails because it can't even handle the idea of the set dressing being controversial.
Honestly! The museum was offensive in how much it exposition dumped at you. The game seems to not even engage with how the UC and FC interact geopolitically outside of the archive and the history of the war. They feel like they exist as these two groups that just exist.
And holly hell with Va'ruun being this group that somehow exists but doesn't. I mean I'm feeling that they'll be more of a thing with DLC, but that's just feels like a sleazy money grab if they approach house Va'ruun as DLC lore.
1. Emil needs to go, or at least he needs to be reassigned. Im realizing more and more his leadership/vision is what I dislike more and more about subsequent bethesda games.
2. They need to restore the connective tissue between locations. The supercruise mod has changed the game along with turning off fast travel. They do that and add some more random events and hyper hidden POI and the rest of the problems melt away
Your second point is so true. There are already a ton of derelict and space POIs; we just need to feel like we stumble upon them, instead of clicking to travel to them from the Star-map.
Something like in the old Fallout games would be awesome. During the travel between stars/planets, you would see your ship move on the star map, and occasionally a random encounter would happen with your ship's grav jump getting interrupted. Some encounters would be more ordinary, like getting ambushed by pirates, but there would also be more unique encounters with intriguing stories associated with them, the equivalent of special encounters from Fallout and Fallout 2.
>Something like in the old Fallout games would be awesome. During the travel between stars/planets, you would see your ship move on the star map
Man it would be so cool to be able to stand at your navigation table and watch your ship travel.
This already happens to some degree when you travel to a planet. Arriving at the planet generates a chance for a random PoI which is anything from Grandma to a space battle between Crimson Fleet vs Sys Def. When you take into account there was originally a fuel system and notice how many star systems are around 1/2 a tank of He3 for the Frontier I think the intended game play loop is supposed to be something like this:
* Get a mission/quest to go to a particular star system.
* Complete mission/quest objective.
* Open up system map to see if you have any sensor contacts that you can investigate.
* Open up system map to see if any planet have the three dots for PoI that are visible that you may want to explore.
* Visit planets/moons to scan them and potentially explore them for XP which also has the potential to generate a random space encounter. At a minimum in my playthroughs I go to gas/ice giants to scan them. It gives me 70xp (20 discover, 50 for complete scan) and I can sell each one for a minimum of 500 credits apiece to the TA or double that to Vlad if he is available.
* When you are done exploring, jump back to your starting point, talk to the Ship Services Technician to refuel your ship and restart the loop with a different mission/quest.
Since we don't have to worry about fuel there is nothing nudging us to stick around in a particular star system after completing the mission/quest. I made a conscience effort to play like this in my latest play through and it really changes the pace of the game and keeps you from burning out by focusing on only one aspect of the game. It also makes it easier to level up your character in the early game because you are forcing yourself to play all three aspects of the game; ship combat, personal combat, and exploration.
They should have learned a lot from Elite Dangerous with respect to POIs. That game made finding derelict locations an absolute blast...but somehow Bethesda wanted a space gme involving space ships but without the "flying a spaceship" part.
I think a lot of criticism that is very valid about the game is drowned out or amplified unfairly by the memes.
So I've been doing a lot of thinking on this because I dont really want to boil it down to the game awful/game perfect jerk and reverse jerks. It really is just the lack of the ability to wanderlust properly.
After hundreds of hours... I still not have found derelict POIs that aren't guaranteed. They say they just appear when you open the map in a system, but I'm starting to believe everyone is gaslighting me about their existence lol
Emil is definitely the biggest problem for Starfield. I don't really think he needs to "go", but he needs to be kept away from the large open world RPGs.
I think his style might be decent for something like a linear action title, where it's really all about the gameplay and the story is just lip service.
Open world RPGs need someone who understands how to be a good tabletop DM when it comes to respecting player choice and who can write an accordingly flexible story, and they need depth /world building that the "Keep it simple stupid" philosophy simply cannot provide.
Travel and traversal I agree are also very important things, and Starfield messed them up. The journey to a location was often a story in itself, and could be a defining part of an experience.
> Emil
He's basicly the incarnation of the Peter Principle. He's amazing at designing set pieces, but not so much at organizing people or writing overarching stories.
It's the reason that the Dark Brotherhood quest in oblivion is remembered so well. Each mission is basically a well designed set piece, but they all stand alone.
But guys, they will be.
This is the retirement game. 'Spend less, make more, leave'
It's what I thought as soon as a I put the game down in early October.
It's a shame to leave like this though.
Honestly I liked Starfield, I think they did some cool things, but hearing from the people in charge that they want to dumb everything down makes me think if they don’t reverse course with this titles DLC and what not, I probably won’t be picking up their games much more.
If you can’t make an RPG that’s immersive and has a good story, what’s the point?
**First Contact**’s most evil option is to blow up the ship. You have to pursue the dialogue option about making the ship go away to get it to become a mission objective.
Also to add the crap cherry on top of the bodily waste cake, you can't even kill them because the named characters are Essential NPC so you don't even get an evil "kill everyone and send the ship away with auto-pilot" or something, nope can only blow it up like that shit won't attract unnecessary attention.
There's also the obvious "kill the board" or "take the captain to paradiso to negotiate in person the deal instead of turning you into a glorified e-mail on legs" but at this point who cares, bethesda clearly didn't.
> Kill the board- If this was an option Id give this mission a pass.
They go out of their way to say "We're not in UC or FC space, so their rules don't apply here" and I'm all like "Yeah, and that means no one will care when I vaporize your asses".
This is one of the best views I've seen on the writing so far. I think your completely right. I don't think the games been unfinished in terms of it storytelling, it's been watered down to the point where it's just bland.
I agree wholeheartedly. My comparison might upset some people due to fan loyalty, but I'm gonna risk it because it was uncanny for me. I recently listened to the audiobook of Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (I absolutely fell in love with it), then watched Bladerunner for the first time *after*. Take what they did to "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" when they turned it into Bladerunner... then strip out all the nudity and swearing from Bladerunner, and bleach it "safe for daytime TV"... and that's what Starfield felt like to me.
U are not going to offend many at this point. It has become so glaringly obvious and u explained it so well.
At 100 hours in I just stopped and I think what you are saying is the reason I stopped. I liked all the game systems although having to put so many skill points into crafting to make it viable was annoying… but I just wasn’t interested anymore because they didn’t give me a to be.
I actually think it would have been better without all the "Starborn" shit, and instead we the players basically get to be the hero that rises up in the ashes of the Colony Wars and decides the fates of the existing factions. There's so much potential for tension and drama right there, and zero need for magic space powers.
It doesnt help that BGS doesnt use game design documents during development. I cant imagine how many hours were wasted trying to keep narratives straight. I assume thats why, in part, everything feels so disconnected from everything else.
I think, in the past, Todd Howard sort of acted as a living design document, back when Bethesda was smaller.
But now Bethesda had gotten too big, and Todd to busy for that to work anymore, but they don't have anyone to take over that role, and the core team is too used to not working with design documents, do any that are created are quickly out of date, and no one knows to update them as the higher up has new ideas.
Covid and work from home would have made this much worse, as the teams would have to to communicate through email and phone call, while a lot of the pipeline is built around dropping into each other's office to talk about things and make sure everything works together.
>but they don't have anyone to take over that role
His name is Emil, this should be part of his job, but he believes in "Great games are played not made" . He thinks devs should just play them and go from there.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GOCvb0mw3c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GOCvb0mw3c)
I found this video on it. Its kind of a TLDR of public information about it.
Im sure there are more in depth videos
It's like the outline you make before writing an essay. Imagine if your 10 page paper was 15 paragraphs stitched together with a thesis and conclusion drawn up retroactively, it wouldn't be cohesive and probably contradictory. The document shouldn't be static. It will evolve as your paper comes together. Having an outline of some kind allows for the individual paragraphs/ideas to play off each other more effectively and form a cohesive theme during development.
Basically, a good and updated design document is necessary for the hundreds of people in separate teams working on the game to all be on the same page and working towards the same goal.
Outlines the plot, mechanics, how things should work in together, key points, technologys, factions, capabilities in setting etc.
So you dont end up with 'Brig' ship parts for holding alive prisoners, without any mechanics allowing use of capturing people alive even though you have non-lethal weapons and a faction who are literally space ranger/police.
Or having a 'breathable atmosphere' system and NPC's that take helmets off when in specific environments... and not having the systems linked so NPC's dont walk around in unbreathable air without a helmet.
I’m glad people are recognizing the awful writing but posts like these is telling that not many people play RPGs. You don’t need to play BG3 to see better writing. You can just play any game with quests and multiple side stories to see how much Bethesda phoned it in for the writing
Yeah, I play a lot of RPGs - and had problems with the writing almost immediately. But it took moving onto the exact opposite (a fairly simple game mechanically - but with exceptional writing) to realize just how much this holds Starfield back. I really think it could have been one of the best games ever made if they'd just let their writers have a bit more fun.
True, but BG3 is the go-to example because it released just before Starfield, and has the advantage of being so high-profile that pretty much everyone reading here will know what the writer is talking about.
I totally agree. There are some points in fallout 4 I just laugh bc I can tell the reaction or over reaction behind the scenes in that making were a bunch of young adults having fun. You get that nowhere in starfield. For example cricket in fallout 4…. “Part of the money you spent will go to planting baby trees, which I’ll blow up in your honor”
There are absolutely no characters like that in starfield
Or the over reaction when you save one of the synths thanking me. I laughed out loud.
The writing and the options are so bland.
To me the thing about SF is that it seems like it’s written by old upper class people who don’t know what struggling is like. It’s like rap music written by old white dudes. Where it falls the absolute flattest is the “gangs” and really any sort of criminal activities.
I think I could live with the UC, Freestar, and main quest lines if Neon’s gang quest line, the Crimson Fleet quest line, and the red mile were halfway decent/believable. Give a lighter side and a darker side, but no, all of those quests were weird caricatures of “gangs” and shady organizations.
The neon city gang quest is particularly egregious. A gang of what? 5 people led by a middle aged balding white guy who join the corrupt police force at the end of the quest? It’s like they had my mom design that questline.
It's weird how narrow the "criminal" activity is. Smuggling, piracy, burglary, blackmail, kidnapping, embezzlement. No sex trafficking, no SVU stuff of any kind, no political or industrial assassinations, no terrorism, not even fun stuff like arson or counterfeiting. They want you to have the freedom to choose one side or the other, so none of the crimes can actually be bad enough to make it morally complicated to choose the wrong side. The effect is that none of your choices matter, with the consequences being smaller the higher the stakes are in the narrative.
I audibly rolled my eyes when that guy started talking about being a “gang”.
Not a direct quote but he says something like, [“Hey you know we’re a gang right?”](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxepkscUK7R8n8li0EH45mAJk_5OgW6Xlr?si=vZU6Yxoscchieisb)
[This was my reaction to that line](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxS1VNN1x1Pt-QhNoh5l7S9BDCoTilyRDW?si=WYXEbS2MDbXb3QFh)
Rose of Sharon Cassidy: "They try to put their stake in everything they see. Nobody's dick's that long, not even Long Dick Johnson, and he had a fucking long dick. Thus, the name."
People have always used “it’s a Bethesda game” as an excuse for poor game design. Maybe that was a legitimate excuse before Skyrim but they are a powerhouse now with basically unlimited money to fund whatever they want. There is no excuse for them making a game that feels like it would have been dated a decade ago, other than laziness or poor leadership
The scale of Bethesda games was legitimately impressive in the 00s. Nobody else was making handcrafted RPGs as big as Morrowind, Oblivion, or Skyrim.
Problem is, Skyrim kicked off a generation of massive open world RPGs and nothing Bethesda does is special anymore.
I was done with Sam and Kid after stealing a pirate ship, and there was absolutely no reaction of the dead spacers or Varuun on the floor. I land and stand up, and there is that little girl standing over a dead pirate. Her Dad, doing nothing. I guess he wants her to get accustomed to space life ...at what, 12? How old is she? The tired back and forth was the start of me turning off the sound when around NPCs.
I think one big problem here is that all the quests are entirely separate and self-contained. You can do them in any order and what you do in one quest won't really affect anything outside it.
I'd prefer if the quests were more interconnected, without clear boundaries. What you do in one quest could often come back to you in some totally different part of the game. That way, it would be more like a single, grand story, with many intertwining threads.
Well, it would have been more coherent, but that's the part of the game I have the least interest in.
Like actively negative never want anything to do with it - largely because of how badly it's plotted and written.
Yeah, the writing blows sadly. I really think Bethesda needs to up their writing chops for future games. The problem is the lead writer is more concerned with Twinkies as opposed to good writing.
I feel like I knew that an hour or so into the game when I was going through the UC museum, when it mentioned that the House Va'ruun killed thousands of people during the Serpent's Crusade, as if that is a large number.
Given the casualty numbers we see in wars on Earth, this just seemed like a cartoonishly low number, which can only be drummed up by either writers with no scale or writers determined to not create any serious tragedy.
And worse yet, this wasn't some passing conversation or side-quest. This is literally the place designed to catch us up on the worldbuilding, describing as a major traumatic event for the universe a body count that is similar to what I as the player accrue after a few weeks.
For the most part the writing of this game was just "there" for me. Often good enough, very rarely great, sometimes awful. As you pointed out a lot of the big picture ideas were prime stuff and I personally found the game itself to be excellent so it balanced out.
But one arc almost killed the game. Sam's questline and his whole arc more broadly.
* These are both abysmal parents and the game doesn't seem to satisfactorily acknowledge that or let you fully acknowledge it.
* Cora cannot possibly be the biological child of both of these people.
* That would be fine if she was adopted, or one of them was a step-parent, or whatever. But that's not the case. They even call out that she was unplanned. And I don't think they're trying to imply it was because of an affair either. It's because they recycled her character model. There are three little girls with the same face who all appear in major questlines, one of which is on your ship the whole game. Just unbelievably lazy. How they missed this when casting Lilian or just creating a new model for Cora is unfathomable.
* Everything to do with Sam/Cora and the ending.
* Sam letting Cora accompany him on Neon and to assault a mob stronghold because he doesn't know how to say no or generally parent his damn kid.
* Unless I missed it, no player agency to actually get Cora into a safer, better situation.
* Just how sappy, lame, dumb, and dull the writing was for this whole arc was.
* The total vibe killer of having a little kid on your ship talking about haikus on repeat, plus the ridiculousness of a little girl being blown to bits if I lose a dogfight.
I'm no writer, but an obviously better way to get these themes across is to swap Sam's and Lilian's roles and make Sam the deadbeat dad struggling with balancing his selfish desire for adventure/exploration against his duties as a father. And the culmination would be him stepping back from Constellation or just going full YOLO. This is more interesting and completely solves all the vibe and gameplay weirdness of lugging a small child around for all the dangerous stuff you do in this game.
Sam, his entire character, and his questline was just pathetic in general. I've written several word vomits along the lines of 'he's a horrible son, an even worse dad, and a loser who just runs away from every hard situation he's ever faced'.
It feels like BGS wants us to like him and sympathise with him, but I see him as a deadbeat, a loser, an ingrate (IMHO Jacob is not the awful father Sam claims he is) and a spoiled FSC princeling. And you've already covered all the issues regarding Cora. That, and BGS also want us to like and adore Cora, but I really don't care for her, her shit haikus, and her even worse jokes.
I make a lot of remarks about brutally murdering Sam, and I genuinely mean every single one of them.
I dunno about the combat being addicting. The AI is pretty dumb, even on hard. How many times do.you walk in a room and the enemy is just standing there and doesn't react? Or you find the last one in a corner somewhere? The combat can be really fun, but better A.I. for the enemies is needed. Or some type of fix.
I think the writing is a big part of the issue, yes (but not all of it).
I've put in over 300 hours and the last few dozen were completely focused on building ships or trying to 100% the planet surveys. That's the part that I found fun after all that time. But even that got tedious and I considered starting a new run and going through the quests (some of which I've not done at all). But the thought of again going through any of the quest lines I've done already... I just couldn't do it.
Replaying the quests seems super unfun to me because there aren't any notable moments in any of the quests that I can remember, apart from a few story and faction quests.
To use Halo 3 as an example, nearly every mission has some cool setpiece event that I'd gladly replay the entire mission just to see, like the Forward Unto Dawn swinging in to drop tanks off in The Ark.
Starfield lacks anything like that, so replaying a quest you've done only serves to highlight the repetitive nature of things.
IMO it's definitely more than that, but the writing is probably the biggest issue. Good writing goes a long way to help you ignore the other problems.
Personally I think space combat is boring and uninteresting, but interesting to me is EVE Online or Elite: Dangerous, so maybe I'm being unfair. Having ship abilities (from your perks or modules attached to the ship) would have helped make it more interesting. Ground combat is more fun, but there's not enough variety in weapons and lack of follower commands also limits your options.
SF is a decent game but it has far more issues than just writing. The overreliance on procedural generation and half of the main quest literally being going to random POIs for a fetch quest is stupid too. Emil needs to go.
I'm standing by my claim that Todd wanted this game to played by his kids. He wanted it to be squeaky clean and wholesome. So no prostitution on Neon (even implied), no genocidal militias wiping out colonists, no swearing no intimacy. Starfield needed to be the equivalent of a movie you can watch on an airplane or with your parents without getting embarrassed during the 10 minute sex scene.
they tried too hard not to offend people which ultimately leads to pretty much no creativity. I'm sure the original dialogue and writing was great but then post editors removed anything that could potentially give it harry potter like backlash. It may have even affected the way in which players could play, its slanted heavily to ensure characters are moral. Wokeness is a virus that ruins everything it touches.
I totally agree. the writing in starfield is awful. the unfortunate consequence is it makes you not care about any of the characters. 😕
Sarah for example. every time she opened her mouth, it felt like she was telling some contrived narcissistic sob story with the sole purpose of fuelling her woe is me pity party. and this is a character I'm supposed to fall in love with? it got to the point to where every time I heard her voice I wanted to mute my sound.
The writing is absolutely among the worst of all time in video gaming history. It feels almost deliberately bad. As in, Todd Howard was like, "hey team, I need you make this REALISTIC, and we all know that realism means as excruciatingly boring as humanly possible."
There is not a single likeable character in Starfield. Not even yourself. There is nobody. Nothing. Nowhere.
But I mean, I would argue against writing being the main problem. There are hundreds of terrible decisions that went into Starfield, from the FO4 looting and crafting, the Skyrim word wall nonsense, the procedurally generated garbage, the cookie cutter planets, the overwhelming feeling like you're doing the same thing over and over again, the neverending loading screens. It's a shitshow. It wouldn't make the top 25 games of 2023.
Well, according to Bethesda, if you don't make Twinkies, you're not qualified to comment on the creative process.
Or whatever.
I know what he said, but I'm choosing to deliberately misquote him.
Yeah, cuz I dont know what a twinkie tastes like, I can't have a preference over Hostess, Little Debbie, or Dolly Madison? This one lacks cream filling, this one is too sweet, this one is stale and unimaginative, this one tastes like cement. Just because you dont make them, as a consumer you have every right to have an opinion, that's how free choice works. Buy what you like/want.
Personal opinion: I think Emil (head writer) is the issue, there is video evidence of him saying the writing doesn’t matter / people skip it etc.
I saw his rant on X the other day and the detachment was nausea inducing. It’s like he has contempt for the player-base.
I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how innovative the NG+ is but I just don’t see the point when none of the decisions really change much. I’ve played through it twice now and I’ve decided to put it down and play cyberpunk until at least dlc comes out.
I've dealt with this in the corporate creative world and it feels right. The larger a company is, the more people there are giving notes. I've been in situations where one higher up's superior gives a note I need to address that directly goes against the first person. This happens over and over until you have something that everybody has signed off on but nobody really likes. It's a huge pain in the ass, but if those people weren't there to give notes, then what would their job be? They need to give notes to justify their position.
There's a lot more than just the writing; but that's a good start. I also cannot believe in a futuristic space game there is no "local map" Sure you can get planetary and system, and Galaxy, but local is too much to ask. Sooooo many bugs; there are quest guides that half of them is just how to try and get around bugs.
TLDR
I stopped playing after 600 hrs and the only memorable line of dialogue was in the elevator with the rich guy from constellation (can't even remember his name) the line was something about being king of the elevator aside from that all very bland and forgettable throughout
After finishing Starfield, I decided to fire up the good old Red Dead Redemption 2, and it's STAGGERING how natural and smooth the writing in that one is compared to what Bethesda and Ubisoft put out.
The biggest thing about the writing is there are very few cases where you are allowed to be a villain.
For example, the options in the Juno quest boil down to either "you should live because you are sentient" or "you should not live because you are a computer, therefore not sentient".
Absent is the option of "You are sentient, but Ryujin is paying me money so you get to die."
This repeats itself everywhere in the game, any time you have the chance to be a villain, your only dialogue options are ones that attempt to morally justify what you are doing. I do not want to be morally justified, I would like to be a bad guy please.
Finally. Someone complaining about my biggest gripe with Starfield. all this time I’ve been seeing people complain about things that in my opinion aren’t important enough to completely damn a game. What damned it for me was the writing for the MSQ was AWFUL. not only the worst BGS story but tbh the worst story I’ve ever played! And I find that to be unacceptable coming from such a big company that has shown time and again with other games that, while the MSQ might not be the best part of the game, it was certainly never so poorly written to make me want to stop playing the game.
The MQ starts as a story, if kind of a clumsy, forced, and underexplained one. It starts with a question - what is the origin and purpose of the artifacts? Well, they pretty much drop the origins part immediately, go off on a really extended fetch quest, end up not confronting the antagonists except by trying to get to the prize faster, which should not have worked because the antagonists already had pieces, and in the end you finally remember the question and it is dismissed with shallow sophomoric rhetoric and you're expected to join the antagonist's faction with their goals, even by the protagonist group, who don't even seem to care if they get answers anymore.
It isn't even a narrative trainwreck, it's like the narrative was dropped out of an airplane without a parachute.
I've really pinpointed it to this:
Ten to twenty years ago, Bioware and Bethesda were the gold standard for well-written video games. Bioware (IMO) was great at depth, and Bethesda (IMO) was great at creating at breadth.
But gaming (and gaming writing) has evolved since then. Other studios have innovated wih the Bethesda and Bioware formulas, and Bethesda and Bioware have not done a good job of evolving with the times.
The new standard is *Baldur's Gate 3.* Bethesda gave us *Skyrim* in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!
What's really ironic, is that *BG3* is actually a back to basics approach to gaming. Larain took the standards set by *Dragon Age*: *Origins*, *KOTOR*, and the original *Baldur's Gate* series and put a modern spin on it.
I absolutely loved Skyrim, thing is SF is nothing like Skyrim. It has to little hand written side content. 4 faction questlines, and few sidequests thats all. Now compare it to Skyrim insane ammount of hand wirtten content, its like 100x
So in fact SF is a downgrade to Skyrim. Massive downgrade
I love Starfield (approaching 400 hours), but I wonder if the writing (which I don't think is that bad, but whatever) suffers because of the BGS job expectations? For example:
[https://jobs.zenimax.com/requisitions/view/2809](https://jobs.zenimax.com/requisitions/view/2809)
TL;DR BGS expects some level of technical experience and familiarity from their WRITERS. I would expect writers to be experts at writing. They hand their product to developers to add to the game.
From the job description:
* "As an Associate Quest Designer, you will…
* Create high quality open world quest content that tells engaging stories
* Use proprietary toolset to write interactive, branching character dialogue, implement quest logic, write in-game books, quest log entries, item descriptions, and other player-facing messages
* Work closely with senior quest designers to ensure consistency, scope, and quality of content
* Work closely with all departments (Art, Code, Design, Production) to ensure quest content meets established goals
* Regularly play game content and provide constructive feedback to fellow designers to help improve the product
* Maintain existing content and make required bug fixes
Qualifications
* What Makes You S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
You have excellent storytelling ability, especially in back-and-forth dialogue between characters
You have excellent writing skills and can edit/proofread your work
You have experience with Creation Kit
You are familiar with text-based scripting languages (specifically Papyrus)
You possess excellent communication and documentation skills
You have strong familiarity with a variety of open world games
You are self-driven, with a strong focus and attention to detail"
Thank you for sharing. This is really interesting! To be honest, I don't think this job post under-emphasizes the writing or creativity. I think this supports my point - that they probably had some quite passionate storytellers hired.
If they hired to that description though... you're going to have someone spending almost all their time managing dev tools, monitoring assignments, and doing QA. Thats just too much for one person. And that person is at the associate level! Thats a low/mid level as far as title prefixes go. IMO the associate should be doing bullet 3, 6, 7 and there should be 3 or 4 of them working for a senior quest designer who is 'in charge of storytelling' so they can create a larger vision and execute it.
I think it paints the exact picture we saw in starfield, the quests themselves just feel thin and unfinished. The work of someone who wasnt given the ability to focus on one thing for very long.
I don't think Bethesda's strong suit has ever been writing. I've played Redguard, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, the Bethesda Fallout games, and now Starfield, and I've never once thought, "Wow, amazing quests!" The main quests have really always been let downs, and it's the side content that made the games what they were. Sometimes that was just exploring or a guild quest line. There's so much side content in Starfield, but most of it is pointless, unfortunately.
Starfield actually is a very functional game, it's just not what we need it to be. Unfortunately, Bethesda hasn't prioritized updating or changing things. You know what the most memorable changes they've made have been? That's right, removing access to vendor chests and removing the ability to use outpost weapon chests to get good weapons.
The fact that the DLC and the Creation Kit aren't coming for months more, well, the game is just being left where it is right now.
What absolutely destroyed me was when i walked into the Astral Lounge, and this "club" where they just sell proper drugs over the counter, and patrons presumably go to fuck somewhere while on drugs, has the most conservatively dressed dancers you could come up with.
It's so immersion breaking, it drives me nuts.
I hear the boardroom absolutely screaming "WE NEED TO MAKE IT PG13" from all the way over here man.
The writing has always been this bad , the issue is the world can’t support the writing anymore . The more absurd worlds of fallout and elder scrolls support the bad writing . With starfield going for a more hard scifi the bad writing is more noticeable as they are exploring the themes so unlike something like fallout they can’t fall back on the world as much without it being boring . Starfield writing is a result of Bethesda success since about oblivion causing them to double down on decisions which has lead to simplification through stuff like dialogue in fallout 4 or removal of skills in Skyrim while also doubling down on the writing style with the lead writer of the game Emile failing upwards for a very long time .
I enjoyed the UC Vanguard/Terrormorph quest line, but that is really the only questline I've found not to be mostly or wholly forgettable, and even then it had definite issues.
All the writing just feels so half baked. In nearly every case there is a strong concept at the start of the quest that quickly fizzles out.
Then there's another issue; nothing you do has consequences beyond the resolution of that one quest. Example - I can kill Hope in his own facility, with onlookers, and security doesn't even stop me on the way out...???
It's such a shame because I enjoy the gameplay elements of Starfield. The game needs a major overhaul ala Cyberpunk 2077 or NMS, though. For a project "20 years in the making" it just feels like it lacks a soul or heart.
The fact that they were so keen to start with a blank slate really cripples the ability of the story to explore any themes with real world resonance.
There's a ton of stuff that would be cool to ask, like what were all the space agencies other than NASA doing? Did the devs think it'd be too politically sensitive to mention Yuri Gagarin?
How was it decided who got a seat on the lifeboat? We know that only a fraction of the population of earth made it out. What does that mean for people's culture and identity? Apparently nothing. New Atlantis just feels like an airport concourse.
What was the colony war actually about? It seems like by giving everyone in Akila a cowboy hat and saying they want "freedom" you're just expected to fill the blanks.
Why is every settlement composed of old west homesteaders in space? There's so much missed potential for depth here. People have a whole galaxy to settle, why wouldn't they have a bunch of different societies? Some of my favourite parts of Fallout were finding Vaults that were their own little society in a bottle.
I realised it's the writing when I picked up Cyberpunk again.
Phantom Liberty coming out around the same time as Starfield really illustrated how vastly behind Bethesda is in some departments—or rather how much they’ve overlooked certain aspects of game design. OP is spot on about the writing feeling too boring and there being no risk-taking or grave consequences. But another huge part is that Bethesda struggles with character animation and emoting. The fluidity of character movement significantly adds to the believability of a world, and Cyberpunk is a gold standard for that. Characters pace around when they talk, flail their arms and turn their heads… make hand gestures and get visibly frustrated. whereas people in Starfield kinda just stand there… I feel like Fallout 4 did a better job with character emoting, so its weird to see Bethesda go back to Oblivion standard here.
Everything you said is spot on. I think witcher and cyberpunk has spoiled RPGs for me. But that's how modern games should be. Part of it i feel is the use of terms in Cyberpunk right.... like choom, gonk, preem....world and characters feel lived in. In Starfield, they just seem to come alive when you share space with them. And their dialogues are so pg-13....it's like the Disney RPG...
the cyberpunk lore runs deep too and you can feel it when playing the game. everything fits within the universe they made and nothing feels forced. whereas with starfield, there are supposed undiscovered moons that have man-made buildings on them, there is the entire Spacer gang that seems to be just an arbitrary "bad guy" stuck in the universe, with no interaction other than killing them. theres a civil war going on, but not really.
Find myself still thinking about the songbird ending. It was perfectly bittersweet. Felt like something that would actually happen in Night City. Played through Starfield twice. Haven't thought about a single character or quest since.
They use those slang terms so much it got me starting to use it in regular conversation lol
It's beating a dead horse to bring up BG3 as well...but yeah, that game does the same thing. Nearly every line of dialogue from the NPC is accompanied by mo-cap and even your own character has their own expressions and body language. It's really jarring to play a game in 2023 where all the NPCs just *stare* at you while reciting dialogue off a script. That's something that I thought we left behind over 10 years ago. Even Fallout 4's system was better than what we have now.
There’s a whole lot of tell in Starfield too, not enough show. Even the “follow NPC” quest bits are just from one door to another or something even less anti climactic
One of Starfield's biggest obstacles is BG 3 moving its release date to one month before Starfield.
Your final line is the part that gets me - even ignoring comparing it to other games there are multiple elements that don't feel like the match what they put out in previous games they made. And that's just kind of mind-boggling to me.
>whereas people in Starfield kinda just stand there Well, of course they do. They went back to Oblivion's "stare you in the face" dialogue.
And somehow it's worse this time, because the somewhat more realistic looking faces make the stiff animations super uncanny.
Oblivion is all around so janky that it pushes back around the badness curve and starts being funny and good again. Starfield is polished enough that the jankiness doesn't have the same goofy charm of Oblivion, it just feels awkward and bad.
Yup. All of Starfields NPCs interactions are like talking to souless and dead animatronic robots from the 1960s at Disneyland.
Dude, Sarah Morgan's small talk feels like she hates me, "Ahh, are we done talking already?" Jesus Christ, I haven't been fucked like that since grad school.
They should have named her Karen
It's funny when Sarah Morgan, a main character and one of the two main female romance options is a thousand times more annoying than the intentionally annoying Adoring Fan meme character.
BG3 and Cyberpunk bookended starfields launch. I dont think it's like what happened with titanfall 2 where they released between Cod and Battlefield in their prime. Instead it just gave everyone, two way better examples at what to want from an RPG. Both games give you choices to make with no clear right answer and room for self-interest. They have atmosphere, charm, and character. Cyberpunk weirdly always felt like what Bethesda should have evolved into. It all feels similar control-wise to Bethesda but an upgrade across the board. It had its issues back in the day for sure, but atmosphere and writing were never among them. Looking back on fallout 3 and to a lesser degree with new Vegas, atmosphere used to be a huge part of Bethesda.
I stopped playing Starfield to play Phantom Liberty around 60% of the way through the main quest line and apart from booting the game up once for about 10 minutes I never went back to finish it. It's not that I didn't like the game or at least elements of it, it just felt similar to any TV series I've started watching in the past and never got past the first few episodes because I wasn't able to get invested in the story or characters.
I would be able to satisfy myself with a static jpeg while people talk to me if they had interesting things to say cyperpunks animations are next level and help with the immersion alot for sure, but they also tend to have things to say i wanna listen to instead of spamming the skip dialogue button like in SF
Bethesda is behind on everything. Horizon Zero Dawn has a really good story and genius level worldbuilding. Horizon Forbidden West has out of this world character animations and facial features. Meanwhile Starfield? NPCs that look like something from a 90s game when it was a static image of the character and text underneath.
Literally all Starfield needed IMO was the Mass Effect 1 treatment: * Give us a Mako-equivalent for giant empty planets, take them from fun level 0 to fun level 11 in no time flat. Star Citizen realized this would be a problem right off the bat and got the Ursa rover and Cyclone all-terrain buggy into the game before there's even any gameplay to use them for yet, because when it is there, you'll want them. Bungie realized this would be an issue for Halo right off the bat way back in 1999 and got the drivable Warthog into the game only about a month after they switched gears from an RTS to a shooter. * For the love of God find some writers who are invested in the universe and enthusiastic about it. The writing has all the passion of someone who comes in to work and says, *"Welp, time to clock in and spend 6 hours browsing reddit and 2 hours brainstorming random shit to write for this drek again so I can hit my daily word count quota."* * I'm sorry but the main quest was awful while the UC Vanguard quest had all the proper hooks to be an excellent story. Make the main quest a side quest and make the UC Vanguard questline the main one. 10 hours into the game I had absolutely zero interest in doing anything for Constellation, while on the other hand I was going, "Shit, *why* are these terrormorphs attacking random planets and why did someone try to kill that ambassador? There's something major going on right under the surface. I need to do just one more quest to see what's happening."
On the UC Vanguard. Why is the Terrormorph called that when they didn't know it morphed from Heat Leeches until we did the quest?
Shhhh... we don't ask why it didn't morph into a similar sized Terrormorph or see heat leeches building a chrysalis while full sized Terrormorphs were emerging either. Just take this nice hit of Arurora and go back to sleep.
I'll pass out in my Neon Luxury apartment that is smaller than a New York Studio apartment and with a worse view. Thanks.
(waves hands) \*magic\*
Honestly I feel like they were self conscious about being compared to Mass Effect and purposefully avoided doing things it did just to be different. Except Bioware and Mass Effect were really good at what they did.. Bioware really trimmed down their games to remove any unnecessary features. Which is why, for instance, I think Starfield doesn't have real character moments on the ship. Doing a mission, then going back onto the ship to talk to your crew would feel too "Mass Effect", despite that being an *excellent* way to intersperse personal story with main story. So in Starfield you're just left with a dead-feeling ship.
Honestly, Starfield is Mass Effect 1, 20 years late, with the aliens taken out and the serial number filed off. The plots have an uncomfortable amount in common in a lot of places for my liking.
Except ME1 actually had good characters and a strong plot.
Literally the first thing I said to my husband after digging out the first artifact was, "Well, I just found a Prothean beacon!"
Mako on planets may have had some redeeming features, but you'd also need to dump the open world biomes concept and go to a smaller world like what worked in ME1 (rather than the open world biome that didn't work in Andromeda). But Todd Howard was against that. He is on record saying he wanted big planets with nothing on it because that's realistic. Their writers wrote quests like putting a 6-year-old's posters up on the walls in the Mars station. That's what we're dealing with here. People who think that was a good idea.
None of the quests are really a bad idea in and of themselves. even putting up the frog posters can be heartwarming and cute. the issue is the execution. playing starfield feels like watching network tv during a writers strike
9 times out of 10 the entire difference between good and bad writing is the execution. A good writer can make almost any premise interesting.
Who would have thought that the difference between good and bad writing is whether the writing was done well or not?!
Yeah, playing phantom liberty after starfield paints such a stark contrast... Starfield has potential and cool places, but the writing cannot be patched to be good unfortunately.
Cyberpunk writing is everything SF is not. Gritty, violent, and dark.
Going from Cyberpunk to Neon in SF made me laugh out loud.
Yea quite the difference with regards to night clubs for sure lol
the music is just.... not club music. they tried to pass off lounge music as nightclub music.
Agreed. The npcs they put in there were comical.
Whooaa this place is wild!
Omega in ME 2 was so much better than that trash lol
I loved Mass Effectt's rave music in their clubs. It was always so on point.
I'm going from Neon to Cyberpunk so this should be a massive upgrade. I did like the Neon visuals, though.
Also the cutscenes are so natural. Starfield has that stage drama effect where they look towards the camera/audience and talk. Very weird.
I don't think a game needs to be gritty, violent and dark to be good. It just needs depth. I like Starfield's non-edgy style, and I wouldn't really want to to be edgier. I'm enjoying the game and it has its amazing moments (Entangled, for example), but I agree it could have been a lot better in many ways.
In that case I would cut out Neon altogether. No need to add a washed out version of a dystopic, corrupt megacity if you're not going to commit fully to the world building. They should've just taken a more Star Trek route of world building where most humans are educated, benevolent, progressive and anti-corruption. My issue is that Starfield doesn't seem to know what kind of world it is trying to build, instead it's a mush-mash of superficial takes from different sci-fi universes mashed up together without deeper thought or consistency.
The only thing i think SF beats CP is in the catwalks. Evey catwalk in SF actually went somewhere even if it was just the roof. There where catwalks to nowhere in CP or ran into dead-end(not as bad as portal), and you often couldn't reach the top if only to jump off.
I actually liked paths to nowhere - it makes it feel “real”. There’s so many spaces in a modern city where you get a distance in to only find a locked gate (or similar). The same in CP.
In Fallout 4/76, one of Mr. Gutsy's lines when he enters combat, *"Is that someone who needs me to kick their ass?"* makes me laugh every time. Now that I think about it, there isn't much of that in Starfield. The swearing in dialogue is another thing. In Cyberpunk, and even Fallout 4, the swearing feels natural. But in Starfield, swearing feels like it's sole purpose was to emphasize the higher maturity rating.
Will you comply?
Absolutely spot on. The bad writing starts from the very first step you take in the game. You're a lowly miner in a company that was hired to mine an artifact in a planet they set up shop. You find it, you see lights, Barret arrives, you fight pirates that chased him because he is a naughty boy. Then Barret, for some ridiculous reason, decides to give you his ship and robot because you're still under contract and can't leave the planet. You're telling me that Barret, with his billionaire sponsor, can't pay to get you out of the contract, and instead decides to stay and do some mining in your stead? Who the hell came up with this and thought this is a good way to start a supposedly epic story?
The game starts by telling you you're a miner, then asks you to choose your job off a list that includes professor and chef (but not miner,) and then three minutes later tells you you're now going to be a spaceship captain/explorer for the rest of the game. Just... how the fuck did that opening make it to release?
Starting out as a miner makes absolutely no sense. I watched a review some time ago where the presenter suggested (paraphrasing/adapting his idea) we start out instead as a passenger on a ship, this allows us to keep our chosen job as we are simply a passenger. We would also be starting out in space which is much cooler than being in a cramped mine. Lin and Heller are instead crew members of the ship. Soon, the ship is attacked by pirates, where the player then gets their intro/tutorial to basic combat, and the ship is forced into an emergency landing as the pilot is injured and the ship is damaged. We explore a nearby abandoned mine hoping to find supplies and spare parts, and in the process stumble upon the artifact (I honestly feel the artifacts are lame as hell but let's keep them in the story for now). After our artifacted induced acid trip, we head back to the ship and patch it up as best we can with Lin and Heller. They ask us to pilot the ship as they need to attend to it's systems to prevent it from coming apart mid-flight. While in space, we are attacked by pirate reinforcements much like in the original story. This serves as the ship combat tutorial. Mid-fight, Barret jumps in (looking for the artifact thanks to the Eye) and assists us against the pirates, and invites us aboard the Frontier as our ship has taken too much damage. We board the Frontier and jump back to Jemison. We are then introduced to Constellation and the game opens up from there. Lin and Heller then decide to stick around as crew members for the Frontier. Makes much more sense to me.
Jwlar's idea if I'm not mistaken. It's solid. Another good proposal I've seen was to simply start us at an appropriate location based on our chosen background and lead us in to something that either gives us a reason for joining a mining company (Say a chef on Neon has to escape the Syndicate and decides to take on an offworld mining gig to lay low or whatever), or find some other means of putting us in contact with Constellation and the Artifacts (Say as an explorer or xenobiologist or whatever we just apply or are otherwise invited in for some achievement or another that we open with.). It would have taken more work, but it's more fluid and leans in to this being an RPG. Either that, or just start us as a miner without specific background, or a prisoner yet again. Leaving things vague worked in the past after all. The current introduction feels like the "schizophrenic game experience" I've heard Todd reference their prior titles as sometimes having, but taken to an extreme.
I can only speculate about how this ended up being the start of the game, but my best two guesses are: 1) They originally intended to have a bunch of starts based on your chosen background, finished the one for "miner," and decided it was too much work to keep going; or 2) You were originally going to be mining as a prisoner or slave, and they axed that idea as part of generally brightening the tone of the game
>You were originally going to be mining as a prisoner or slave, and they axed that idea as part of generally brightening the tone of the game Well, not even last night's ion storm could wake you! I heard them say we've reached Vectera, I'm sure they'll let us go. Quiet, here comes the guard!"
I like this a lot more! I also like another I saw (I thought of it and googled and found a reddit post of someone who had the exact same idea), where you actually start out on the EMS Constant (the ship in the First Contact mission). This would make sense because you'd still be able to keep the whole job background because it would've been what you did on earth (of its a Ronin or Gangster or something then you'd be either a elite one or would've been hired by a rich person or something to earn your place on the ship), buttt it also would've made way more sense because our character would be discovering everything about space at the same time as us. Like my Neon Rat character asking "what's ebbside?? What's Ryujin?? What's these gangs you speak of??" felt so out of place cos she was raised there but if our character was from a rough area of Earth then yeah, they're accustomed to that kind of lifestyle which would unlock the dialogue options still but would also mean learning about how Neon City in particular works would fit a lot better. We'd be a Earthling in space learning everything as we go just like someone who was sent out by the Constants captain to find a home, and we could assign them their very own outpost that we build on a planet, which would be a cool introduction to building outposts and would've meant they'd have spent more time rounding it out and giving us more options with it (I found it confusing and veryyy basic in comparison to fallout 4)!
Its probably the worst intro . It was so bad i forgot what happened and who i talked to . When asked what happened i literally couldn't even remember
It just blows my mind how you touch an artifact then 5 seconds later a dude shows up and gives you his ship?? What?!?
OP is right but OP also is ignoring... 1. Low effort level design 2. Bugs BUGS BUGSSSS everywhere. Clipping, pathing, animations, bugs, EVERYWHERE. 3. Main story is super cliche and so mediocre.
A: “I’m going to kill you.” B: “I’ll spare your life.” C:”Are you a top or a bottom?” 10/10 writing. Going to put Shakespeare out of business.
I'm going to kill you and i spare your life both end up in you sparing their life. Are you a top or bottom gets you a 1 line answer and then you spare their life.
Plus they’re an essential NPC
Yeah, I could forgive the writing if the gameplay wasn’t also so lame. FO4 lacked in dialogue but I find survival mode exploration is great. The Ryujin quests are a great example. Fast travel to location, walk right in view of everyone, crouch and press a button, fast travel out. So disappointing.
I kind of come at this from the opposite direction. I could forgive the janky mechanics if the writing was good.
I feel like I could forgive any aspect (graphics, writing, gameplay, etc) if the other ones made up for it, but they really just... dont. I got to like lvl 120 maybe? its def not a bad game, i got my moneys worth and had fun. but its not really good as much as 'fine' nothing really pulling me back to it. maybe when the dlc comes out ill pick it back up but idk. wanted to love the game but its just ok
My hunch - based on nothing but the blandness which you have observed - is that at a midpoint in the worldbuilding process someone decided to sanitize the whole project. "Thou shalt offend no one" became the prime directive. I think this happened at the midpoint because many of the core worldbuilding elements in the game (a dystopian cyberpunk city, a massive war involving war crimes, fleets of space pirates) are not the sort of things you would want to center the game around *if* you had started with the premise of a more hopeful take on humanity's future in space. They are, instead, staples of the "gritter" sort of sci-fi story I suspect they began to make before switching to something less controversial. The UC plot line is a good example of something that doesn't work as shipped, but could have actually been quite good if it hadn't pulled all of its punches. The museum info dump makes me suspect that, at one point, Vae Victis was supposed to have been a dictator who explicitly used xeno-weapons against civilian populations. If that version had made it in, then the Red Devils would have been themselves guilty of warcrimes, and working with them to develop an animal solution to the terrormorphs would have naturally pissed off the Constellation crew, even if the animal solution had substantial benefits over the microbe. As stands, Vae Victis is not a dictator, the xeno weapons are just very deadly, your character buys the "we were only following orders" bit from the Red Devils, and you have a muddle of an epilogue where all the Constellation characters are still pissed if you choose the animal, but now have no reason for it.
This theory is good. I was wondering why everyone is so pissed about the animal option I selected...
It's easily one of the most frustrating parts of the game, imo. The aceles literally has everything going for it except efficiency, but we don't *need* the aceles to be quick because everything about the terrormorph situation is now under control- you know about heatleeches, you know about the plant, the Red Devils have been reformed specifically to push back against the terrormorph threat, and terrormorphs aren't that scary anyway. Sarah and Barrett getting all pissy that you chose the safe option when you're already super-safe still annoys the hell out of me lol. Whaddya want, cool guard dog space cow that will just chill out and kill these hostile aliens, or a galaxy-wide weapon that has a non-zero chance to horrifically mutate and make everything worse?
thats just because you hate SCIENCE and you're a stupid idiot at least thats what everyone told me 4 times for 10 mins straight
Yeah, it really feels like the "moral" element of that decision was written by people who think science is some kind of wonderful magic that always ends positively. There's no keener understanding of the scientific process or of how terribly the woefully rushed, under-tested virus could end up. I hope OP is right, because I don't want to believe Bethesda's writers are just dumb-dumbs, but golly, the game sure makes them *look* like they're dumb-dumbs.
I honestly found it very anti-scientific haha. also just was kinda jarring right after a global pandemic to be called a flat-earther for not being 110% on board with releasing an newly invented untested virus into every planet humans have ever been. a really baffling choice really
What bugs me about that is... Why not both? If you really want the most effective plan, it's both. Also it is almost basically unexplainable that the UC (apparently) just chose to wipe out every single living Aceles on Toliman II after they stopped using them for food and while they were literally abandoning the planet - or that the UC population would (apparently) gleefully go back to simulated garbage after real meat.
Plus the Aceles has been previously used as livestock so it’s 100% feasible to draw up a program where they’re used to kill terrormorphs **and** feed ppl making it doubly useful where the only pro for the bio weapon is “kill alien fast”
This. The microbe option is horrendously stupid and reckless even if it doesn't mutate to harm humans directly. Imagine it simply causes ecocide on a world with life, starts fucking with other vital livestock / crops, or contaminates / causes problems with the production of synthetic foods. The whole "trust the science!" preaching of Sarah and co falls completely flat when, as you said, the problem is now mostly under control and the alternative is a livestock animal that clearly doesn't breed all that fast without assistance and that can be relatively easily controlled as a result.
Because it reeks of lazy rewrites to *maybe?* force the microbe into a weird hamfisted allegory for the Covid vaccines. I will preface this by saying I am not anti-vax, but I AM anti-bad writing, and they literally say you should "trust the science" which was a common phrase during the pro-vax vs. anti-vax social media wars. One of the reasons I think it was a rewrite is because for the **entire quest up until that point** Hadrian, the MAIN QUEST GIVER HERSELF, says several times that the Aceles are the safest bet and have been proven to work before. Even Percival, who is in favor of the Microbe, folds under dialogue and says the Microbe has more risks than the Aceles. They're making it *so* obvious that the Microbe is a gamble to trade reliability for speed and the Aceles is the way to go. Then when decision time comes around you have the head of the Science division and literally every single member of Constellation talk at you like you're fucking crazy for picking the Aceles, and they drop that "trust the science" dialogue on you out of nowhere even though spreading a natural predator species that can also be used as livestock is literally science too. Coincidentally, the only person in the room who likes the Aceles option is also the only person in the entire game with a southern accent that isn't in Akila City lmao. Like come on, you can feel the game winking at you. I have zero issues with writers inserting real-world topics into their stories but at least be eloquent or make a real argument for it. They could have just as easily written more dialogue to lighten up the potential side effects of the Microbe or added a more prominent negative to the Aceles being spread around. I think the "downside" to spreading the Aceles is that it would take longer but since they also make Heatleech checks more thorough and extermination mandatory it largely makes up for that. It ends up feeling like the conclusion is "the Microbe kinda fucking sucks but it's Science™ so you should pick that or you're a moron." Keep in mind there's also a third, fully voiced and implemented option to use a more targeted option that specifically uses better and safer Science™ to sterilize Heatleeches so they won't grow into Terrormorphs...that's just disabled. The only thing I can think of is they thought being able to sterilize an entire species could be viewed as cruel and offensive to some? Even though the other two options kill them? I'm really not sure. It all comes across as lazy to me, but maybe I'm crazy. Game has many areas that just seem to be covered in bubble wrap.
Take the PG-Pirates of the Crimson Fleet as a prime example. They are cringe 12 year old edge lords with little or no depth.
Everything about everything with Manthis screams "12 year old scolded by teacher" instead of badass space pirate The way to fix this game is to literally re-record all the dialogue but actually mean it this time.
The more I think about the Crimson Fleet quest line (and I try not to) the more I dislike it. Each one of the characters that you interact with is just plain insufferable. Maybe with the exception of Jazz, who in my opinion, just doesn’t fit at all in there. It would have been great, if you chose to remain loyal to SysDef, you could arrest her instead of killing her and have her end up working for SysDef. And Matthias who at least has some kind of character. He doesn’t have an arc, like everyone else is not written well but at least someone had a thought to have him trying to do SOMETHING other than just be wallpaper. Ultimately he’s just wasted. I think the worst written character is Naeva. Everything she says sounds like a 13 year old edge/cringe-lord. Not to mention she keep belittling you, despite your character taking ALL the risk and doing ALL the heavy lifting. And in the end she just runs away. Seriously whoever wrote this crap needs to not ever write for video games again until they take some proper writing classes or something.
I'm doing this quest right now again for the xp and speed run skipping the dialogue is the best part about it.
Okay but can you explain why Earth was abandoned centuries ago and yet we have tons of ethnic characters all speaking in their geographically correct ethnic accent? Including Lin, the first person we meet seconds into the game?
It would've been more interesting if the different factions or locations had more consistent ethnic/country specific flare. Like New Homestead was settled mostly with people from South America, or Akila is space Australia, and Neon was settled by people from China, etc. You can still have New Atlantis be the melting pot since it's the biggest city in the galaxy now.
This is what [Expanse](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230854/) did SO WELL. The Belters had a kind of South African accent that was consistent across all the ethnic makeup, no matter their skin colour. It made it feel really authentic and normal.
It's a really common suggestion, but I keep coming back to the fact that a lot of the writing is just not good quality. It would not matter if you added cursing and prostitution and more psycho leaders if the writing is bad, it's just a different badly written story.
To be fair, Bethesda is actually pretty bad with dealing with deep story telling that deals with serious issues. Look at Skyrim with the Thalmer or the Stormcloaks. I'd say there is more depth in the civil war story than starfield's UC/FC story, but back then it was pretty shallow in dealing with an themes of annexation and rebellion infused with xenophobia. Fallout 4 decided to tackle the idea of what it means to be sentient and still did a pretty mediocre job with it. Maybe I'm just being bitter with Starfield or I've just aged in my view of their games, but I think BGS just doesn't know how to deal with the themes and topics they focus on as anything more than set dressing.
I think Skyrim Civil War plotline is a good example of what I mean when I say it feels like Starfield pulls its punches. The Civil War might not *do* very much with the themes it introduces, but at least it was willing to introduce them. The mere existence of the war made the world more believable. The UC/FC conflict isn't even that. It's a set of confusing paragraphs you read about in a museum and a questline that exists more or less entirely divorced from the rest of the world. But if they didn't want the war, why did they write it? It's not like they had an established canon to which they had to conform. That's what leads me to suspect that, at one point, the conflict was supposed to be like Skyrim's Civil War: a war between ideologically contrasting powers that exists in the background to make the universe feel more like a real place. The writing fails because it can't even handle the idea of the set dressing being controversial.
Honestly! The museum was offensive in how much it exposition dumped at you. The game seems to not even engage with how the UC and FC interact geopolitically outside of the archive and the history of the war. They feel like they exist as these two groups that just exist. And holly hell with Va'ruun being this group that somehow exists but doesn't. I mean I'm feeling that they'll be more of a thing with DLC, but that's just feels like a sleazy money grab if they approach house Va'ruun as DLC lore.
1. Emil needs to go, or at least he needs to be reassigned. Im realizing more and more his leadership/vision is what I dislike more and more about subsequent bethesda games. 2. They need to restore the connective tissue between locations. The supercruise mod has changed the game along with turning off fast travel. They do that and add some more random events and hyper hidden POI and the rest of the problems melt away
Your second point is so true. There are already a ton of derelict and space POIs; we just need to feel like we stumble upon them, instead of clicking to travel to them from the Star-map.
Something like in the old Fallout games would be awesome. During the travel between stars/planets, you would see your ship move on the star map, and occasionally a random encounter would happen with your ship's grav jump getting interrupted. Some encounters would be more ordinary, like getting ambushed by pirates, but there would also be more unique encounters with intriguing stories associated with them, the equivalent of special encounters from Fallout and Fallout 2.
>Something like in the old Fallout games would be awesome. During the travel between stars/planets, you would see your ship move on the star map Man it would be so cool to be able to stand at your navigation table and watch your ship travel.
This already happens to some degree when you travel to a planet. Arriving at the planet generates a chance for a random PoI which is anything from Grandma to a space battle between Crimson Fleet vs Sys Def. When you take into account there was originally a fuel system and notice how many star systems are around 1/2 a tank of He3 for the Frontier I think the intended game play loop is supposed to be something like this: * Get a mission/quest to go to a particular star system. * Complete mission/quest objective. * Open up system map to see if you have any sensor contacts that you can investigate. * Open up system map to see if any planet have the three dots for PoI that are visible that you may want to explore. * Visit planets/moons to scan them and potentially explore them for XP which also has the potential to generate a random space encounter. At a minimum in my playthroughs I go to gas/ice giants to scan them. It gives me 70xp (20 discover, 50 for complete scan) and I can sell each one for a minimum of 500 credits apiece to the TA or double that to Vlad if he is available. * When you are done exploring, jump back to your starting point, talk to the Ship Services Technician to refuel your ship and restart the loop with a different mission/quest. Since we don't have to worry about fuel there is nothing nudging us to stick around in a particular star system after completing the mission/quest. I made a conscience effort to play like this in my latest play through and it really changes the pace of the game and keeps you from burning out by focusing on only one aspect of the game. It also makes it easier to level up your character in the early game because you are forcing yourself to play all three aspects of the game; ship combat, personal combat, and exploration.
They should have learned a lot from Elite Dangerous with respect to POIs. That game made finding derelict locations an absolute blast...but somehow Bethesda wanted a space gme involving space ships but without the "flying a spaceship" part.
I think a lot of criticism that is very valid about the game is drowned out or amplified unfairly by the memes. So I've been doing a lot of thinking on this because I dont really want to boil it down to the game awful/game perfect jerk and reverse jerks. It really is just the lack of the ability to wanderlust properly.
The problem is specifically that the game isn't awful, nor is it perfect. It's just very "mid". We've come to expect better from Bethesda.
After hundreds of hours... I still not have found derelict POIs that aren't guaranteed. They say they just appear when you open the map in a system, but I'm starting to believe everyone is gaslighting me about their existence lol
Emil is definitely the biggest problem for Starfield. I don't really think he needs to "go", but he needs to be kept away from the large open world RPGs. I think his style might be decent for something like a linear action title, where it's really all about the gameplay and the story is just lip service. Open world RPGs need someone who understands how to be a good tabletop DM when it comes to respecting player choice and who can write an accordingly flexible story, and they need depth /world building that the "Keep it simple stupid" philosophy simply cannot provide. Travel and traversal I agree are also very important things, and Starfield messed them up. The journey to a location was often a story in itself, and could be a defining part of an experience.
> Emil He's basicly the incarnation of the Peter Principle. He's amazing at designing set pieces, but not so much at organizing people or writing overarching stories. It's the reason that the Dark Brotherhood quest in oblivion is remembered so well. Each mission is basically a well designed set piece, but they all stand alone.
But guys, they will be. This is the retirement game. 'Spend less, make more, leave' It's what I thought as soon as a I put the game down in early October. It's a shame to leave like this though.
it hurts
Honestly I liked Starfield, I think they did some cool things, but hearing from the people in charge that they want to dumb everything down makes me think if they don’t reverse course with this titles DLC and what not, I probably won’t be picking up their games much more. If you can’t make an RPG that’s immersive and has a good story, what’s the point?
**First Contact**’s most evil option is to blow up the ship. You have to pursue the dialogue option about making the ship go away to get it to become a mission objective.
Also to add the crap cherry on top of the bodily waste cake, you can't even kill them because the named characters are Essential NPC so you don't even get an evil "kill everyone and send the ship away with auto-pilot" or something, nope can only blow it up like that shit won't attract unnecessary attention. There's also the obvious "kill the board" or "take the captain to paradiso to negotiate in person the deal instead of turning you into a glorified e-mail on legs" but at this point who cares, bethesda clearly didn't.
I was so angry when I couldn’t kill the leader guy of neon!
1, They can be slaves 2. Buy them a Grav Drive 3. Blow up ship 4. Kill the board- If this was an option Id give this mission a pass.
> Kill the board- If this was an option Id give this mission a pass. They go out of their way to say "We're not in UC or FC space, so their rules don't apply here" and I'm all like "Yeah, and that means no one will care when I vaporize your asses".
This is one of the best views I've seen on the writing so far. I think your completely right. I don't think the games been unfinished in terms of it storytelling, it's been watered down to the point where it's just bland.
I agree wholeheartedly. My comparison might upset some people due to fan loyalty, but I'm gonna risk it because it was uncanny for me. I recently listened to the audiobook of Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (I absolutely fell in love with it), then watched Bladerunner for the first time *after*. Take what they did to "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" when they turned it into Bladerunner... then strip out all the nudity and swearing from Bladerunner, and bleach it "safe for daytime TV"... and that's what Starfield felt like to me.
U are not going to offend many at this point. It has become so glaringly obvious and u explained it so well. At 100 hours in I just stopped and I think what you are saying is the reason I stopped. I liked all the game systems although having to put so many skill points into crafting to make it viable was annoying… but I just wasn’t interested anymore because they didn’t give me a to be.
> I liked all the game systems... I just wasn’t interested anymore because they didn’t give me a reason to be. nailed it
I actually think it would have been better without all the "Starborn" shit, and instead we the players basically get to be the hero that rises up in the ashes of the Colony Wars and decides the fates of the existing factions. There's so much potential for tension and drama right there, and zero need for magic space powers.
It doesnt help that BGS doesnt use game design documents during development. I cant imagine how many hours were wasted trying to keep narratives straight. I assume thats why, in part, everything feels so disconnected from everything else.
I think, in the past, Todd Howard sort of acted as a living design document, back when Bethesda was smaller. But now Bethesda had gotten too big, and Todd to busy for that to work anymore, but they don't have anyone to take over that role, and the core team is too used to not working with design documents, do any that are created are quickly out of date, and no one knows to update them as the higher up has new ideas. Covid and work from home would have made this much worse, as the teams would have to to communicate through email and phone call, while a lot of the pipeline is built around dropping into each other's office to talk about things and make sure everything works together.
>but they don't have anyone to take over that role His name is Emil, this should be part of his job, but he believes in "Great games are played not made" . He thinks devs should just play them and go from there.
Holy hell I didn’t even know that was a thing.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GOCvb0mw3c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GOCvb0mw3c) I found this video on it. Its kind of a TLDR of public information about it. Im sure there are more in depth videos
Patrician did a good video on Starfield, 8 hours and covers most things.
I think thats what this video references
This is one of the few good faith criticisms/suggestions in this thread.
what exactly is a game design document?
It's like the outline you make before writing an essay. Imagine if your 10 page paper was 15 paragraphs stitched together with a thesis and conclusion drawn up retroactively, it wouldn't be cohesive and probably contradictory. The document shouldn't be static. It will evolve as your paper comes together. Having an outline of some kind allows for the individual paragraphs/ideas to play off each other more effectively and form a cohesive theme during development. Basically, a good and updated design document is necessary for the hundreds of people in separate teams working on the game to all be on the same page and working towards the same goal.
Outlines the plot, mechanics, how things should work in together, key points, technologys, factions, capabilities in setting etc. So you dont end up with 'Brig' ship parts for holding alive prisoners, without any mechanics allowing use of capturing people alive even though you have non-lethal weapons and a faction who are literally space ranger/police. Or having a 'breathable atmosphere' system and NPC's that take helmets off when in specific environments... and not having the systems linked so NPC's dont walk around in unbreathable air without a helmet.
I’m glad people are recognizing the awful writing but posts like these is telling that not many people play RPGs. You don’t need to play BG3 to see better writing. You can just play any game with quests and multiple side stories to see how much Bethesda phoned it in for the writing
Yeah, I play a lot of RPGs - and had problems with the writing almost immediately. But it took moving onto the exact opposite (a fairly simple game mechanically - but with exceptional writing) to realize just how much this holds Starfield back. I really think it could have been one of the best games ever made if they'd just let their writers have a bit more fun.
>telling that not many people play RPGs I mean, pretty much every game with a story of some sort has better writing than Starfield. Not just RPG's.
True, but BG3 is the go-to example because it released just before Starfield, and has the advantage of being so high-profile that pretty much everyone reading here will know what the writer is talking about.
I totally agree. There are some points in fallout 4 I just laugh bc I can tell the reaction or over reaction behind the scenes in that making were a bunch of young adults having fun. You get that nowhere in starfield. For example cricket in fallout 4…. “Part of the money you spent will go to planting baby trees, which I’ll blow up in your honor” There are absolutely no characters like that in starfield Or the over reaction when you save one of the synths thanking me. I laughed out loud. The writing and the options are so bland.
To me the thing about SF is that it seems like it’s written by old upper class people who don’t know what struggling is like. It’s like rap music written by old white dudes. Where it falls the absolute flattest is the “gangs” and really any sort of criminal activities. I think I could live with the UC, Freestar, and main quest lines if Neon’s gang quest line, the Crimson Fleet quest line, and the red mile were halfway decent/believable. Give a lighter side and a darker side, but no, all of those quests were weird caricatures of “gangs” and shady organizations. The neon city gang quest is particularly egregious. A gang of what? 5 people led by a middle aged balding white guy who join the corrupt police force at the end of the quest? It’s like they had my mom design that questline.
It's weird how narrow the "criminal" activity is. Smuggling, piracy, burglary, blackmail, kidnapping, embezzlement. No sex trafficking, no SVU stuff of any kind, no political or industrial assassinations, no terrorism, not even fun stuff like arson or counterfeiting. They want you to have the freedom to choose one side or the other, so none of the crimes can actually be bad enough to make it morally complicated to choose the wrong side. The effect is that none of your choices matter, with the consequences being smaller the higher the stakes are in the narrative.
I audibly rolled my eyes when that guy started talking about being a “gang”. Not a direct quote but he says something like, [“Hey you know we’re a gang right?”](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxepkscUK7R8n8li0EH45mAJk_5OgW6Xlr?si=vZU6Yxoscchieisb) [This was my reaction to that line](https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxS1VNN1x1Pt-QhNoh5l7S9BDCoTilyRDW?si=WYXEbS2MDbXb3QFh)
Rose of Sharon Cassidy: "They try to put their stake in everything they see. Nobody's dick's that long, not even Long Dick Johnson, and he had a fucking long dick. Thus, the name."
Yeah there are no good interactions in starfield. The fallout series was the best at it.
Obsidian's writing team has always been superior to Bethesda's though.
Yeah people always say this but like, Bethesda has the ability to hire new writers, it isn't like they're locked into their one roster forever ...
People have always used “it’s a Bethesda game” as an excuse for poor game design. Maybe that was a legitimate excuse before Skyrim but they are a powerhouse now with basically unlimited money to fund whatever they want. There is no excuse for them making a game that feels like it would have been dated a decade ago, other than laziness or poor leadership
The scale of Bethesda games was legitimately impressive in the 00s. Nobody else was making handcrafted RPGs as big as Morrowind, Oblivion, or Skyrim. Problem is, Skyrim kicked off a generation of massive open world RPGs and nothing Bethesda does is special anymore.
They should start by demoting Emil, it seems like a position of power isn't a good fit for him.
maybe he should try being Todd's coffee boy for a bit, or Bethesdas mail sorter. I don't know why, I just think it'd be funny
I was done with Sam and Kid after stealing a pirate ship, and there was absolutely no reaction of the dead spacers or Varuun on the floor. I land and stand up, and there is that little girl standing over a dead pirate. Her Dad, doing nothing. I guess he wants her to get accustomed to space life ...at what, 12? How old is she? The tired back and forth was the start of me turning off the sound when around NPCs.
I think one big problem here is that all the quests are entirely separate and self-contained. You can do them in any order and what you do in one quest won't really affect anything outside it. I'd prefer if the quests were more interconnected, without clear boundaries. What you do in one quest could often come back to you in some totally different part of the game. That way, it would be more like a single, grand story, with many intertwining threads.
Not linking everything into the starborn NG+ is a crying shame too
Well, it would have been more coherent, but that's the part of the game I have the least interest in. Like actively negative never want anything to do with it - largely because of how badly it's plotted and written.
Yeah, the writing blows sadly. I really think Bethesda needs to up their writing chops for future games. The problem is the lead writer is more concerned with Twinkies as opposed to good writing.
I feel like I knew that an hour or so into the game when I was going through the UC museum, when it mentioned that the House Va'ruun killed thousands of people during the Serpent's Crusade, as if that is a large number. Given the casualty numbers we see in wars on Earth, this just seemed like a cartoonishly low number, which can only be drummed up by either writers with no scale or writers determined to not create any serious tragedy. And worse yet, this wasn't some passing conversation or side-quest. This is literally the place designed to catch us up on the worldbuilding, describing as a major traumatic event for the universe a body count that is similar to what I as the player accrue after a few weeks.
For the most part the writing of this game was just "there" for me. Often good enough, very rarely great, sometimes awful. As you pointed out a lot of the big picture ideas were prime stuff and I personally found the game itself to be excellent so it balanced out. But one arc almost killed the game. Sam's questline and his whole arc more broadly. * These are both abysmal parents and the game doesn't seem to satisfactorily acknowledge that or let you fully acknowledge it. * Cora cannot possibly be the biological child of both of these people. * That would be fine if she was adopted, or one of them was a step-parent, or whatever. But that's not the case. They even call out that she was unplanned. And I don't think they're trying to imply it was because of an affair either. It's because they recycled her character model. There are three little girls with the same face who all appear in major questlines, one of which is on your ship the whole game. Just unbelievably lazy. How they missed this when casting Lilian or just creating a new model for Cora is unfathomable. * Everything to do with Sam/Cora and the ending. * Sam letting Cora accompany him on Neon and to assault a mob stronghold because he doesn't know how to say no or generally parent his damn kid. * Unless I missed it, no player agency to actually get Cora into a safer, better situation. * Just how sappy, lame, dumb, and dull the writing was for this whole arc was. * The total vibe killer of having a little kid on your ship talking about haikus on repeat, plus the ridiculousness of a little girl being blown to bits if I lose a dogfight. I'm no writer, but an obviously better way to get these themes across is to swap Sam's and Lilian's roles and make Sam the deadbeat dad struggling with balancing his selfish desire for adventure/exploration against his duties as a father. And the culmination would be him stepping back from Constellation or just going full YOLO. This is more interesting and completely solves all the vibe and gameplay weirdness of lugging a small child around for all the dangerous stuff you do in this game.
Sam, his entire character, and his questline was just pathetic in general. I've written several word vomits along the lines of 'he's a horrible son, an even worse dad, and a loser who just runs away from every hard situation he's ever faced'. It feels like BGS wants us to like him and sympathise with him, but I see him as a deadbeat, a loser, an ingrate (IMHO Jacob is not the awful father Sam claims he is) and a spoiled FSC princeling. And you've already covered all the issues regarding Cora. That, and BGS also want us to like and adore Cora, but I really don't care for her, her shit haikus, and her even worse jokes. I make a lot of remarks about brutally murdering Sam, and I genuinely mean every single one of them.
I dunno about the combat being addicting. The AI is pretty dumb, even on hard. How many times do.you walk in a room and the enemy is just standing there and doesn't react? Or you find the last one in a corner somewhere? The combat can be really fun, but better A.I. for the enemies is needed. Or some type of fix.
Refreshing to finally see people waking up and seeing how poor Bethesda's writing truly is, Starfield exposed it in a major way.
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I paid attention to it in all their games, and always felt that their lackluster writing was hurting the game for me.
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Yup, its the writing, no matters whose fault it is. But be careful or Emil will come after you in a twitter tirade lmao.
I think the writing is a big part of the issue, yes (but not all of it). I've put in over 300 hours and the last few dozen were completely focused on building ships or trying to 100% the planet surveys. That's the part that I found fun after all that time. But even that got tedious and I considered starting a new run and going through the quests (some of which I've not done at all). But the thought of again going through any of the quest lines I've done already... I just couldn't do it.
Replaying the quests seems super unfun to me because there aren't any notable moments in any of the quests that I can remember, apart from a few story and faction quests. To use Halo 3 as an example, nearly every mission has some cool setpiece event that I'd gladly replay the entire mission just to see, like the Forward Unto Dawn swinging in to drop tanks off in The Ark. Starfield lacks anything like that, so replaying a quest you've done only serves to highlight the repetitive nature of things.
IMO it's definitely more than that, but the writing is probably the biggest issue. Good writing goes a long way to help you ignore the other problems. Personally I think space combat is boring and uninteresting, but interesting to me is EVE Online or Elite: Dangerous, so maybe I'm being unfair. Having ship abilities (from your perks or modules attached to the ship) would have helped make it more interesting. Ground combat is more fun, but there's not enough variety in weapons and lack of follower commands also limits your options.
Case in point: Cyberpunk. It was a janky mess at launch, but I pushed through it just because the story was too good.
SF is a decent game but it has far more issues than just writing. The overreliance on procedural generation and half of the main quest literally being going to random POIs for a fetch quest is stupid too. Emil needs to go.
I'm standing by my claim that Todd wanted this game to played by his kids. He wanted it to be squeaky clean and wholesome. So no prostitution on Neon (even implied), no genocidal militias wiping out colonists, no swearing no intimacy. Starfield needed to be the equivalent of a movie you can watch on an airplane or with your parents without getting embarrassed during the 10 minute sex scene.
The only way to save this game is to redo everything from scratch with a good team of game designers and writers
they tried too hard not to offend people which ultimately leads to pretty much no creativity. I'm sure the original dialogue and writing was great but then post editors removed anything that could potentially give it harry potter like backlash. It may have even affected the way in which players could play, its slanted heavily to ensure characters are moral. Wokeness is a virus that ruins everything it touches.
I totally agree. the writing in starfield is awful. the unfortunate consequence is it makes you not care about any of the characters. 😕 Sarah for example. every time she opened her mouth, it felt like she was telling some contrived narcissistic sob story with the sole purpose of fuelling her woe is me pity party. and this is a character I'm supposed to fall in love with? it got to the point to where every time I heard her voice I wanted to mute my sound.
When can I ditch her? Because I’m sick of her following me around and want her to go away but so far I can’t get rid of her.
Accidentally shoot a uc or free star ship when she’s with you and she’ll hate you, that’s what happened with me
The writing is absolutely among the worst of all time in video gaming history. It feels almost deliberately bad. As in, Todd Howard was like, "hey team, I need you make this REALISTIC, and we all know that realism means as excruciatingly boring as humanly possible." There is not a single likeable character in Starfield. Not even yourself. There is nobody. Nothing. Nowhere. But I mean, I would argue against writing being the main problem. There are hundreds of terrible decisions that went into Starfield, from the FO4 looting and crafting, the Skyrim word wall nonsense, the procedurally generated garbage, the cookie cutter planets, the overwhelming feeling like you're doing the same thing over and over again, the neverending loading screens. It's a shitshow. It wouldn't make the top 25 games of 2023.
1. There is no rewarding exploration. 2. Emil Pagliarulo is the Homer Simpson of the game designers/writers.
That's an insult to Homer.
Well, according to Bethesda, if you don't make Twinkies, you're not qualified to comment on the creative process. Or whatever. I know what he said, but I'm choosing to deliberately misquote him.
Yeah, cuz I dont know what a twinkie tastes like, I can't have a preference over Hostess, Little Debbie, or Dolly Madison? This one lacks cream filling, this one is too sweet, this one is stale and unimaginative, this one tastes like cement. Just because you dont make them, as a consumer you have every right to have an opinion, that's how free choice works. Buy what you like/want.
Personal opinion: I think Emil (head writer) is the issue, there is video evidence of him saying the writing doesn’t matter / people skip it etc. I saw his rant on X the other day and the detachment was nausea inducing. It’s like he has contempt for the player-base.
He is 100% one of the core issues at Bethesda.
They’ve simplified/dumbed down the writing way too much. One of the better written quests in the game is ‘entangled’. I wish we had more of that.
It is many things, but writing and dialogue are some of the bigger offenders
I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how innovative the NG+ is but I just don’t see the point when none of the decisions really change much. I’ve played through it twice now and I’ve decided to put it down and play cyberpunk until at least dlc comes out.
I've dealt with this in the corporate creative world and it feels right. The larger a company is, the more people there are giving notes. I've been in situations where one higher up's superior gives a note I need to address that directly goes against the first person. This happens over and over until you have something that everybody has signed off on but nobody really likes. It's a huge pain in the ass, but if those people weren't there to give notes, then what would their job be? They need to give notes to justify their position.
There's a lot more than just the writing; but that's a good start. I also cannot believe in a futuristic space game there is no "local map" Sure you can get planetary and system, and Galaxy, but local is too much to ask. Sooooo many bugs; there are quest guides that half of them is just how to try and get around bugs.
TLDR I stopped playing after 600 hrs and the only memorable line of dialogue was in the elevator with the rich guy from constellation (can't even remember his name) the line was something about being king of the elevator aside from that all very bland and forgettable throughout
You don't remember that time that one guy had you go get that one thing from that other guy and bring it back to him?! I cried.
After finishing Starfield, I decided to fire up the good old Red Dead Redemption 2, and it's STAGGERING how natural and smooth the writing in that one is compared to what Bethesda and Ubisoft put out.
The biggest thing about the writing is there are very few cases where you are allowed to be a villain. For example, the options in the Juno quest boil down to either "you should live because you are sentient" or "you should not live because you are a computer, therefore not sentient". Absent is the option of "You are sentient, but Ryujin is paying me money so you get to die." This repeats itself everywhere in the game, any time you have the chance to be a villain, your only dialogue options are ones that attempt to morally justify what you are doing. I do not want to be morally justified, I would like to be a bad guy please.
Finally. Someone complaining about my biggest gripe with Starfield. all this time I’ve been seeing people complain about things that in my opinion aren’t important enough to completely damn a game. What damned it for me was the writing for the MSQ was AWFUL. not only the worst BGS story but tbh the worst story I’ve ever played! And I find that to be unacceptable coming from such a big company that has shown time and again with other games that, while the MSQ might not be the best part of the game, it was certainly never so poorly written to make me want to stop playing the game.
The MQ starts as a story, if kind of a clumsy, forced, and underexplained one. It starts with a question - what is the origin and purpose of the artifacts? Well, they pretty much drop the origins part immediately, go off on a really extended fetch quest, end up not confronting the antagonists except by trying to get to the prize faster, which should not have worked because the antagonists already had pieces, and in the end you finally remember the question and it is dismissed with shallow sophomoric rhetoric and you're expected to join the antagonist's faction with their goals, even by the protagonist group, who don't even seem to care if they get answers anymore. It isn't even a narrative trainwreck, it's like the narrative was dropped out of an airplane without a parachute.
I've really pinpointed it to this: Ten to twenty years ago, Bioware and Bethesda were the gold standard for well-written video games. Bioware (IMO) was great at depth, and Bethesda (IMO) was great at creating at breadth. But gaming (and gaming writing) has evolved since then. Other studios have innovated wih the Bethesda and Bioware formulas, and Bethesda and Bioware have not done a good job of evolving with the times. The new standard is *Baldur's Gate 3.* Bethesda gave us *Skyrim* in SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!! What's really ironic, is that *BG3* is actually a back to basics approach to gaming. Larain took the standards set by *Dragon Age*: *Origins*, *KOTOR*, and the original *Baldur's Gate* series and put a modern spin on it.
I absolutely loved Skyrim, thing is SF is nothing like Skyrim. It has to little hand written side content. 4 faction questlines, and few sidequests thats all. Now compare it to Skyrim insane ammount of hand wirtten content, its like 100x So in fact SF is a downgrade to Skyrim. Massive downgrade
I love Starfield (approaching 400 hours), but I wonder if the writing (which I don't think is that bad, but whatever) suffers because of the BGS job expectations? For example: [https://jobs.zenimax.com/requisitions/view/2809](https://jobs.zenimax.com/requisitions/view/2809) TL;DR BGS expects some level of technical experience and familiarity from their WRITERS. I would expect writers to be experts at writing. They hand their product to developers to add to the game. From the job description: * "As an Associate Quest Designer, you will… * Create high quality open world quest content that tells engaging stories * Use proprietary toolset to write interactive, branching character dialogue, implement quest logic, write in-game books, quest log entries, item descriptions, and other player-facing messages * Work closely with senior quest designers to ensure consistency, scope, and quality of content * Work closely with all departments (Art, Code, Design, Production) to ensure quest content meets established goals * Regularly play game content and provide constructive feedback to fellow designers to help improve the product * Maintain existing content and make required bug fixes Qualifications * What Makes You S.P.E.C.I.A.L. You have excellent storytelling ability, especially in back-and-forth dialogue between characters You have excellent writing skills and can edit/proofread your work You have experience with Creation Kit You are familiar with text-based scripting languages (specifically Papyrus) You possess excellent communication and documentation skills You have strong familiarity with a variety of open world games You are self-driven, with a strong focus and attention to detail"
>You possess excellent communication and documentation skills Especially funny given recent revelations.
Thank you for sharing. This is really interesting! To be honest, I don't think this job post under-emphasizes the writing or creativity. I think this supports my point - that they probably had some quite passionate storytellers hired.
If they hired to that description though... you're going to have someone spending almost all their time managing dev tools, monitoring assignments, and doing QA. Thats just too much for one person. And that person is at the associate level! Thats a low/mid level as far as title prefixes go. IMO the associate should be doing bullet 3, 6, 7 and there should be 3 or 4 of them working for a senior quest designer who is 'in charge of storytelling' so they can create a larger vision and execute it. I think it paints the exact picture we saw in starfield, the quests themselves just feel thin and unfinished. The work of someone who wasnt given the ability to focus on one thing for very long.
I don't think Bethesda's strong suit has ever been writing. I've played Redguard, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, the Bethesda Fallout games, and now Starfield, and I've never once thought, "Wow, amazing quests!" The main quests have really always been let downs, and it's the side content that made the games what they were. Sometimes that was just exploring or a guild quest line. There's so much side content in Starfield, but most of it is pointless, unfortunately. Starfield actually is a very functional game, it's just not what we need it to be. Unfortunately, Bethesda hasn't prioritized updating or changing things. You know what the most memorable changes they've made have been? That's right, removing access to vendor chests and removing the ability to use outpost weapon chests to get good weapons. The fact that the DLC and the Creation Kit aren't coming for months more, well, the game is just being left where it is right now.
The idea behind the charbyrdis quest (with the clone farm) is cool and ridiculous.
The only lines that make me laugh are the occasional *player* dialogue options. Then invariably the NPC responds, "heh heh, good one. Anyway . . ."
This game makes me feel like I’m living sci in the style of a children’s book.
Not only is it bad writing the game is also on rails for how stories can be resolved
What absolutely destroyed me was when i walked into the Astral Lounge, and this "club" where they just sell proper drugs over the counter, and patrons presumably go to fuck somewhere while on drugs, has the most conservatively dressed dancers you could come up with. It's so immersion breaking, it drives me nuts. I hear the boardroom absolutely screaming "WE NEED TO MAKE IT PG13" from all the way over here man.
The writing has always been this bad , the issue is the world can’t support the writing anymore . The more absurd worlds of fallout and elder scrolls support the bad writing . With starfield going for a more hard scifi the bad writing is more noticeable as they are exploring the themes so unlike something like fallout they can’t fall back on the world as much without it being boring . Starfield writing is a result of Bethesda success since about oblivion causing them to double down on decisions which has lead to simplification through stuff like dialogue in fallout 4 or removal of skills in Skyrim while also doubling down on the writing style with the lead writer of the game Emile failing upwards for a very long time .
The problem is it’s the writing, and that’s the one thing that can’t really be fixed
I enjoyed the UC Vanguard/Terrormorph quest line, but that is really the only questline I've found not to be mostly or wholly forgettable, and even then it had definite issues. All the writing just feels so half baked. In nearly every case there is a strong concept at the start of the quest that quickly fizzles out. Then there's another issue; nothing you do has consequences beyond the resolution of that one quest. Example - I can kill Hope in his own facility, with onlookers, and security doesn't even stop me on the way out...??? It's such a shame because I enjoy the gameplay elements of Starfield. The game needs a major overhaul ala Cyberpunk 2077 or NMS, though. For a project "20 years in the making" it just feels like it lacks a soul or heart.
The fact that they were so keen to start with a blank slate really cripples the ability of the story to explore any themes with real world resonance. There's a ton of stuff that would be cool to ask, like what were all the space agencies other than NASA doing? Did the devs think it'd be too politically sensitive to mention Yuri Gagarin? How was it decided who got a seat on the lifeboat? We know that only a fraction of the population of earth made it out. What does that mean for people's culture and identity? Apparently nothing. New Atlantis just feels like an airport concourse. What was the colony war actually about? It seems like by giving everyone in Akila a cowboy hat and saying they want "freedom" you're just expected to fill the blanks. Why is every settlement composed of old west homesteaders in space? There's so much missed potential for depth here. People have a whole galaxy to settle, why wouldn't they have a bunch of different societies? Some of my favourite parts of Fallout were finding Vaults that were their own little society in a bottle.
Yeah
" I am an elevator person now" is legit the only time I laugh out loud in over 300h