Starfield sure is popular to hate on
I mostly hate on it because it completely botched a genre / gameplay type that I enjoy a lot (sci fi exploration and survival) and turned it into a loading screen simulator that couldn’t feel less interesting if it tried.
I got the game for free and couldn’t even be bothered to finish the intro. Just a wholly bland, uninteresting setting that at no point manages to make me feel like I am exploring space, or having fun. By far the “best” made aspect is space combat, and that’s only moderately fun either.
gameplay type … survival
Bethesda never claimed starfield would be a survival game.
Yeah… The only genre they ever claimed it would be is a Bethesda-style open world game. Which it definitely is. People who expected the next NMS or Elite Dangerous were setting themselves up to be disappointed.
I got it for free with my cpu, spent three hours trying to get it to work on Linux and then, finally achieving that, spent two hours in game and just got bored. The Bethesda veneer is fully on display here and it’s hard to not feel like Neo at the end of The Matrix when he sees the underlying design behind everything. You just realize it’s the same game all over again with a different skin, with no evolution in mechanics, UI, or technology.
I specifically recall getting to the major city hub and walking past a mission board and just thinking “well fuck that” and walking right past it. That is shit lazy design. Side quest emergence should be organic, not a shopping list. I spent twenty minutes trying to travel to a moon that was very much visible to me before realizing I’m not actually able to and have to fast travel. That was an unbelievably frustrating experience and is inexcusable given how long Space Engine, Elite: Dangerous, No Man’s Sky, Star Citizen (at least partially) and others have existed.
The writing in the tutorial and Constellation intro fell very flat for me, and the hook was very very weak. The turnaround from “you’re a nobody” to “you’re a galactically important person” gave me whiplash and the Constellation group felt unrealistically eager to bring a stranger on board (except, of course, for token Mr. Tropey McGrumpypants). It felt less like a story and more like a shoehorn.
“Why would they do that?” "So the game can happen. " “Oh ok.”
I mean, Bethesda writing has always been pretty bare bones and pedestrian, so I guess it’s not that surprising, but it is still disappointing and jarring.
Oh and the companion robot was easily the most annoying companion I’ve ever had in a video game. I put it down after those two in game hours over a month ago and have had no compulsion to revisit it whatsoever.
I feel like Bethesda, from top to bottom, has a lot of introspection to do. Sadly, from this news, it doesn’t sound likely to happen.
Bethesda. Bethesda never changes. This is a company that is well known for releasing extremely buggy games and letting the modders fix them for free so it really doesn’t come as a surprise that their public response to valid criticism of their half-assed writing and development would basically be “you just don’t understand our genius”.
While the game does have a lot of loading screens, I think the disappointment mostly comes from people having wrong expectations.
The people complaining mostly seem to be people that expected a game that feels like an open galaxy Star Wars game. Starfield is not that. Starfield is more like a 2009 Space Odyssey game. It leans farther into “realistic” space games like Elite Dangerous and less into “fantasy” space like Star Wars. For example, planets in real life are mostly just lifeless barren rocks, as Elite and Starfield both depict. Actually, there is more to explore in Starfield than Elite due to the procedural cave systems and outposts on planets being more plentiful in Starfield. Elite feels bigger because there are other players playing with you, and both politics and economy change in realtime in response to collective player actions. Not so in Starfield. Elite is also very good at hiding its loading screens so that, for the most part, they do not interrupt gameplay like they do in Starfield. In actuality, Starfield is a bigger game than Elite. Not in that there are more planets or anything, but that there is more to explore. More NPCs to interact with in a meaningful way. Because Elite was built as a space sim and not an RPG, this is by design.
Starfield itself is quite good. The end user experience suffers due to loading screen fatigue and players expecting planets to not be barren lifeless rocks like they would be in reality. This is where I believe the problem lies.
Regarding the lifelessness argument: one of my favorite and most played games ever is space engineers, which is essentially a Minecraft like sci fi sandbox in a largely procedurally generated map.
The game has no concept of npcs in the expected sense, the only real pve component are randomly spawned hostile vessels. There are no cities or inhabited planets, no actual story. Actual planets and moons are maybe a dozen overall, everything else is procedurally generated asteroids. The physics are only a rough approximation to real life.
And still, the game has hooked me for literally thousands of hours, simply because I can actually do shit. Once you are loaded into a map there isn’t a single loading screen to deal with. Piloting your ship is wholly your responsibility and you do it from start to orbit to wherever you want to go. And you can actually go anywhere you want, no railroading or handholding period. You are fully in control at all times.
Even just taking off in a random direction in space is fun: What might happen? Find a resource rich asteroid and make a mining station? Encounter a pirate fleet and get into a firefight? Accidentally slam my fuel tank into an asteroid, causing me to lose my fuel? Do I freeze to death in space or do I chance into an asteroid with more?
It lacks almost everything starfield has, on paper, but is still miles ahead as a game about exploring space.
It leans farther into “realistic” space games like Elite Dangerous and less into “fantasy” space like Star Wars. For example, planets in real life are mostly just lifeless barren rocks, as Elite and Starfield both depict.
As a realism enthusiast that is obsessed with simulations, there’s one question that needs to be asked of every game regardless of how realistic and ambitious it aspires to be: “Is it fun?”
If it’s not fun, then it’s not worth playing.
So there I was a low paid unskilled worker in a mine, till one day I touch a magic space rock then before you know it a complete stranger just gives me his ship and his robot and tells me I’m the chosen one. This broke my immersion and my fun.
Like most gamers I am a total success in life. A fulfilling carrier, relationships, money and the respect of my peers. So when I play a video game I really want an escape from this quant nightmare that is my perfect life and just play as a low life shlub who gets paid minimum wage to risk his life in order to increase the profits of those above him. Is that too much to ask Bethesda?
That doesn’t seem desperate or anything
Starfield frustrates me, because in many ways its a major step in the right direction. It has much better roleplaying mechanics than Skyrim or Fallout 4, but at the same time the lore is half-baked and the skill system is fairly weak. It has great potential, but a lot of it feels toned down and less “real” because of it. Space exploration has a lot of potential as well, but setting every objective so far apart on planets ruins exploration by filling it with monotonous procgen.
That’s why I’m fairly confident that once properly patched, and mods/DLCs are in full swing, it will probably be remembered very fondly despite the release state. It’ll pull a Cyberpunk.
They have to rebuild the entire game to make it fun. Every mechanic is poorly implemented.
Shipbuilding? Inconsequential.
Gun modification? Same as it ever was.
Food and drink? Why do I give a shit?
Base building? Just as janky as FO76.
Research? Annoying progression block.
The map? So spread out that everything is behind a loading screen.
Everything from stem to stern is just…bad. Stop using the fucking Creation engine you dumbasses! That’s why nothing fucking works! You don’t have an engine that’s even capable of supporting a large space game. Why did they think it could? Sunk fucking cost fallacy out the ass.
Shipbuilding doesn’t need to be rebuilt, just add the fuel mechanic back to give drive upgrades weight and add more space content.
Gun Modification is fine, it doesn’t need to be overhauled. It can be better, and cosmetic paints could be added I suppose.
Food and Drink just need the previously hinted at survival mode, so you actually have to plan trips. Not rebuilt from the ground up.
Base building is fine-ish, just needs more benefits.
Research just needs rebalancing, it’s fine as a gate for progression.
The map just needs distances cut in half for proc-gen formulas and more locations added to the pool.
The game doesn’t really need to be rebuilt, it just needs a survival mode, some new assets and uses for base building (reinforced by survival mode), and distances cut in half for proc-gen.
What made Bethesda games decent was how dense the maps were, but there is no density here.
Skyrim and Fallout are games where you can pick a direction, go, and probably find something weird or interesting - a side quest, a fun environmental story, etc. Starfield literally cannot have this by design because everything is on a different planet, in a different system - the density of the map is gone, and scattered across a giant cosmos that can’t be navigated without loading screens.
What happens on a procgen planet if I pick a direction and go? The same thing, every time - a boring cave or outpost filled with the same bullet sponge spacers as literally everywhere else.
There needs to be actual stuff to do outside of quests to make the game fulfilling. There’s so much nothingness.
I’m completely disgusted by the thought, but I’m like 90% sure they half assed everything “knowing” modders would fix it and they fully intend on charging you for those mods…
It’s absolutely fucking disgusting that Bethesda feels entitled to the profits of other peoples work to fix their shit games… They are testing out the new creation store with an update to Skyrim coming very soon and have already built starfield with that in mind (modders have already spoken about the difficulty of modding starfield at the moment because of these changes.)
They pitch it as a boon to modders as they’ll get paid, but modders always had links to patron accounts that Bethesda/(now Microsuck) couldn’t get their greedy fingers on… I hope no one mods the game to be honest even though I preordered it with the high hopes of modding making the game even better than Skyrim… Greed kills again.
The criticism that Bethesda doesn’t finish their games because they expect volunteer modders to has been around since at least Oblivion IIRC. I always thought it was BS, but since Fo4 was essentially remade from the ground up into a now quite beloved game by the mod scene they may have considered this with Starfield. Bethesda now is more Zenimax than the Bethesda of 10 years ago so while I didn’t believe it then I have less reason to doubt now.
That’s so pathetic. There is a comedy club near that does this. If your review isn’t glowing, they respond shittily to your complaints. All this does is make the business/developers look petty and gross.
Whenever I see this, on Google reviews or whatever, it just solidifies what the complaint was and basically is tantamount to the responder doubling down on whatever the reviewer was saying. Valid or not. When you respond with passive aggressive “kindness” or denial, it just makes you look like a piece of shit, even if you are actually in the right. I cannot fathom how people don’t understand this.
