It feels like when Fallout 3, 4 and Skyrim came out you couldn’t escape people posting about them for weeks, especially with Skyrim. Now the most I’ve seen are complaints about how disappointing Starfield was.
Is the game that much blander or does Internet culture just move on that much faster these days? On the other hand, I do feel like there was a lot more enthusiasm for other games like Elden Ring, and sometimes you get an Among Us that just completely take over the Internet.
I’ve played nearly a hundred hours of it for some reason and it’s incredibly mid. Every cool concept ends in a huge disappointment.
When you find out that monster terrorist attacks were happening because the Space Liberals kept Space Hitler alive in the basement, the options are to quietly tell the same Space Liberals what happened and they quietly dispose of Space Hitler or lie to them and keep Space Hitler alive. No option to go to the media or one of the other factions and be like “Yo they have Space Hitler alive in the basement and he’s responsible for this.”
When 200+ year old generation ship shows up at a now-existing resort planet, the options are buy them a hyperdrive, put them into indentured servitude, or kill everyone on board. If you try to kill the resort CEO and be like “they can have your house” you can’t because he’s set as essential and can’t be killed.
Pretty much every cool concept has an ending this disappointing. And that’s if you can get the thing to run at a playable framerate and without crashing. Low settings get me 45fps and look worse than Skyrim on medium, on a PC that can run Skyrim at ultra above 60. My PC is in no way the best, but there is absolutely no reason this game should run as poorly as it does with how mediocre it looks.
The only part I actually like is the core “shooting dudes” gameplay. The guns feel nice. Headshotting the not very smart AI as they pop around a corner feels good. If I could just have an infinite dungeon to shoot dudes in that’d be pretty fun.
Games really need to get past the be nice to all or a complete fascist scumbag binary when it comes to “moral” choices. Seems like this game took a step in the wrong direction toward be a shitlib or be a fascist
IIRC even Outer Worlds which was pretty lib lets you kill the capitalist aristocracy?
When you find out that monster terrorist attacks were happening because the Space Liberals kept Space Hitler alive in the basement, the options are to quietly tell the same Space Liberals what happened and they quietly dispose of Space Hitler or lie to them and keep Space Hitler alive. No option to go to the media or one of the other factions and be like “Yo they have Space Hitler alive in the basement and he’s responsible for this.”
When 200+ year old generation ship shows up at a now-existing resort planet, the options are buy them a hyperdrive, put them into indentured servitude, or kill everyone on board. If you try to kill the resort CEO and be like “they can have your house” you can’t because he’s set as essential and can’t be killed.
DO NOT QUESTION THE POWER STRUCTURES
THE POWERS THAT BE ARE INFALLIBLE AND ETERNAL, THEY MAY NOT BE UNDERMINED
DO NOT FOR ONE SECOND CONSIDER FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE, CHANGE IS IMPOSSIBLE, THE SYSTEM MUST STAY THE SAME
Yeah, the writing is the most frustrating shitlib pabulum. The shooting mechanics are pretty good, and I actually kinda like the space combat. And I’m not usually a GRAPHICS kinda guy, but the graphics suck for what the game is. I felt like I was in Fallout 4.
I finally got around to playing Cyberpunk right before it (speaking of broken shitlib games) and I was disappointed by the graphics and character design and customization of Starfield comparing the two.
Even the smaller side quests are like this. I was especially pissed at the “Help the space police” event where you visit the space FBI to recover a police asset and there’s no option to steal or destroy it. The quest just plays straight and I decided to just never turn it in because anything else is too disappointing.
Then there’s the fucking random arrest into police informant shit which just fucking sucks.
random arrest into police informant
you can eventually kill the cops without consequence which was the only part of the game I liked
I think the Bethesda cycle has gone a lot faster this time around with people more or less turning on it within a month releasing long more thought out reviews than the first wave of day 1 stuff. BG3 coming out and astounding everyone immediately prior also happened to just make it the easiest thing to compare it to and unfortunately for Starfield, BG3 is a fucking masterpiece. Starfield has some interesting ideas and some interesting stuff in it, but it’s just so hampered by poor design choices and a lifeless world that it didn’t hit it for people.
In the probably dozen videos discussing it about a month after release, it’s almost universally compared to BG3, nobody thinks about Elden Ring to compare it to, and I feel like it’s for Starfield’s benefit in that regard. Elden Ring did a substantially better more interesting world to explore than anything Bethesda’s released in years. On top of that, this is probably Bethesda’s weakest world, people that were pretty into the Bethesda formula find Starfield more difficult to really click with because the worlds are barren and there’s so much homogenous slop. The other day I was looking at the steam front page and wasn’t particularly surprised to see Starfield at like the 15th top selling game on steam at the time with BG3 sitting at the top still. Starfield was losing to Skyrim in sales according to steam’s front page.
Bethesda burned through pretty much all the nostalgia and good will at this point, FO76, premium mods, the lackluster FO4 after New Vegas. That weird elder scrolls mobile game they released that everyone seems to have forgotten about. The gajillion re-releases of Skyrim. These other titles had the benefit of long franchise power and fans being established from the better titles and finding parts they could enjoy or how the lore has been expanded. Recently I watched some Fallout lore videos and they’ve certainly taken it places with the tabletop and 76 additions. Like they’ve just fully embraced adding lovecraftian ancient ones to the universe with the tabletop more or less confirming that there’s an ancient God behind the church of Atom. There’s also stuff about the mothman cult secretly being a front for worshipping some other tentacled creature. People are going to dig through this stuff much more because they basically write the stories after Bethesda throws shit around. In my time playing Starfield, I found the clean corpo UC and the space cowboys of the FC. There were references to a war between them that had since ended and that was about it. I looked around a bit for more lore but found basically nothing.
My time in Starfield ended up being mostly momentum after forcing myself to see it through for a few hours which at that point I kept going for inertia and time sunk. I wanted only a few things. To fly a cool spaceship, to build a cool base, and to shoot cool guns. None of that happened. I didn’t give a shit about the main plot and immediately ditched it the first chance I could.
With the spaceship part I did a bunch of side content looking to make money to finance a cool ship only to realize I needed to stat dump into piloting to get the best parts, which took a few hours of grinding to get to because level gates suck and destroying 30 ships takes a long fucking time. I had made a few others in the meantime and realized just how bland it really was. I was expecting a honeycomb style ship when I made my first wide ship, but the game just arbitrarily decides where doors will be placed, so have fun with that connecting hallway being a dead end and your ship snaking you around for a while. Eventually grabbed a mod that gave me all the ship parts at a single vendor and built the best ship I could and by then I couldn’t stand the remnants of the lego-style connections standing out with the ship being unsleek and looking patched together at best.
Building a base and guns I didn’t even get to start. I spent at least 20 hours grinding for resources and fighting against the game’s inventory system trying to build up some mining outposts to get me the raw resources to then build a base. But I was also trying to do gun modding which ate all my resources. Resources weigh an ungodly amount and even after patching in a mod that would remove the weight while I carried them and cheating my carry weight up like 4x, I still spent ages in the inventory menu trying to balance stuff while never having the right stuff because there are so many resources to juggle that get siphoned up by everything. After a while I was literally just playing to get these parts and I just never opened it again preferring to just open stellaris and play with gigastructural engineering.
My favorite part of FO4 was the basebuilding paired with Sim Settlements. I dumped a few hundred hours on that alone. The gameplay loop was fun, I’d go out and with a mod that removed junk weight, would pick locations clean to then build homes for people.
The big complaints I’ve seen with Starfield are that it’s a dead feeling world, the NPCs are boring, the NPCs are super rude, the essential tag is abused, they even just have certain NPCs unable to even get damaged by the player. Like why can’t I even hurt the jackass in Neon that’s murdering people in the name of profit? Why is the board of the resort planet essential where I have to either enslave or drive off a colony ship that left Earth hundreds of years prior. Other complaints are about the abysmal story making itself meaningless in the process.
There were interesting ideas but Bethesda is a fundamentally unambitious uncreative company at this point. The power system they lifted from FTL is interesting, but in the middle of a fight you’re really not going to fiddle much with it. The shipbuilding is close to being good but is limited. Basebuilding is a step back from FO4. Carry limits are more obnoxious than ever. NPC animations are back to Oblivion. James Stephanie Sterling commented that they liked the one character that was meant to be annoying because they had character that the rest of the cast did not. The animations are in the uncanny valley for me and they all seem to love puckering their lips when they talk.
NASApunk is also just a boring aesthetic
Sounds like some shitty Bethesda monkey’s paw attempt at No Man’s Sky, which, unlike your average Bethesda game, was thoroughly un-fucked by its development studio over the course of the past several years since initial lauch.
Hello Games is also a significantly smaller dev team with a smaller budget so it’s almost sad that a full giant AAA dev team can’t make what an indie studio has been chipping away at for like 7 years to make it actually good.
Last I read Microsoft outsourced most of the development of Halo 5 to contractors who were told they’d become full employees but it never came to fruition. If this is an industry trend, then I can see how half of the budget is inefficiently spent on trying to catch people up to speed before firing them and getting a new guy.
Fallout 4 basebuilding is a pain in the ass, Valheim does it 100x times better
The base building in Valheim is so satisfying, at least until a troll wielding a whole-ass tree comes a knocking at your door. The quality of base building may have something to do with Valheim being a good game and Fallout 4 being hot trash though, possibly…
The trick is to use console commands. Perfect control over position and angle without any restrictions. Takes more time, but once you’re used to it it’s relatively fast
Just got to the colony ship mission and closed the game after realizing those were my only two options
destroying 30 ships takes a long fucking time
The ships you blow up in the Vanguard flight sim count against this total ;)
The 12 hours tutorial might be off-putting for people who aren’t Bethesda pay piggies
Also, this might just be me but the game just looks so incredibly bland and drab, no flair or personality whatsoever
Yeah. Nasapunk is an incredibly generic aesthetic. The factions are all different flavors of liberal so there’s nothing really interesting about them. The constant loading screens break up the exploration people loved in Skyrim and previous games. There’s a dearth of hand-crafted stuff to find. It’s all very bland, generic, and stripped down from prior games. Really embarassing, but Cash Rules Everything Around Me.
I refuse to play games with the illusion of choice when the choices that are offered are all apathy-liberal “improving society somewhat is impossible” interactive sermons.
I don’t need to improve the entire world but I’d like to help people and make things better locally without some smug concescending narrative rails saying “actually that was stupid and wrong and you went against the Witcherino Code, you simpleton.”
Apparently Todd called it “Skyrim in space” before launch, so
a) people are waiting for modders to fix all the issues, or
b) people finally got tired of the shallowest storylines ever, which leads to
c) people are waiting for modders to add stories worth playing
the problem is how will they get the modders enthusiastic enough to leave fallout 4 or skyrim 8 anniversery special edition. those games it seemed like everyone played for a while, they’re still on meme templates and shit. if a big modding community doesn’t organically crop up, the game is never going to get fixed, it’s never going to be worth playing, and the monetization of those mods they for sure put in the accounting sheets will never materialize. fuckers suffering from success on the free labor of fans forget how to make a good product
Honestly I hope the game stays shit and modders don’t fix it. I get doing things out of passion - whether with or without donations/compensation - is the point of modding, but the industry, and especially Bethesda, has taking advantage of people’s good will. Free labor is one thing, but free labor due to negligence is bullshit.
man you can really tell that bethsoft was coasting off the fumes of the quality worldbuilding of TES and Fallout
the moment they had to make their own setting they made the most uninspired shit ever
tbf Elder Scrolls is their own setting too. tbef, it is also the most uninspired shit ever
Has to be my favorite fictional setting by far - the worldbuilding isn’t just the “muh deep lore” shit but actually incredibly fascinating religious cosmology and philosophy. The 36 Lessons of Vivec, the Sword Meetings of Cyrus, the concept art…
This is all almost entirely separate from what is actually represented in game though. They can’t help themselves but make generic western fantasy fetch quest sandboxes.
It does but all the amazing worldbuilding is an illusion caused by character statements and books in-game that expound on interesting lore. Most of it is never actually relevant, never appears in game, or when it does appear in game, it is changed radically to be more mundane and not at all how it was described (Cyrodiil). I think the only cool lore that actually paid off was when they foreshadowed all the Dragonborn business in Skyrim in a few ways including Mankar Camoran seemingly being a Dragonborn due to be able to wear the amulet and describing “speaking fire” or something in one of his books
I think a lot of the original world building was done by people who no longer work there, so still coasting
Pretty much everyone of the original crew that built the world dipped by the end of Morrowind. In one of those ungodly 8+ hour retrospectives I watched I remember them sorta dissecting quests in Morrowind in terms of who wrote them and in doing so you could sorta see the proto-modern Bethesda emerge from Todd’s design choices.
