Emil sounds defensive but he’s right – as someone outside the gaming industry, I cannot fathom how so much effort can result in such a shallow, tepid stew of shit. But because of how much time, staff and money were thrown at it, it’s not a big stretch to assume that incompetence was involved – unless it was leprechauns that stole the game’s vision, plot, dialogue, sense of scale and exploration and replaced it with loading screens.
Follow that up with why or I’ll just assume it’s complicity with a heavy reliance on the missing modding community
“This game sucks!” “Don’t pretend like you know why it sucks!” “Wait… wut? I was just stating my opinion O.o”
It doesn’t have “it.” I don’t know what “it” is, but I know Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 had “it” and somehow Starfield does not. It is completely devoid of that “it” factor that their other games had, even if it has everything else those games had and more. It is still missing the crucial “it.”
Well crafted lovely little places to discover even if they have no impact on the grander story.
That’s it. Auto generated planets and straight forward hub locations makes for boring exploration but in the fallout games you could discover a school that was feeding their kids radioactive slime because they got paid too and it was just a side story. Skyrim games you could stumble upon a house that had been ravaged by accidental tunnels into a cave full of nightmares cracking open in the basement.
Things that you stumble upon naturally while exploring and feel crafted carefully to just be a fun side off thing but if they have to put up a neon sign and make you fast travel to a location to find their little joke of a raider camp then it doesn’t feel special. It’s just a bunch of disjointed maps stuck together through a menu.
I would go out on a limb and say it’s probably the joys of traveling and discovering things along the way. The Bethesda “magic” is their approach in open world game design. In almost every corner, there’s something interesting to discover (side quests, well crafted environment, and characters). When you take that away and replace it with just mundane fast traveling, loading screens, and procedurally generated empty maps, then you get Starfield. It’s a Bethesda game missing that Bethesda “magic”
If your talking about MW3, I wouldn’t know. But the MW franchise and COD in general is an objectively shitty game. It’s just cool because you can launch it in minutes and instantly have 14 year Olds in your ear telling you how much weight your mother had recently gained. And if you were angry you could take it out in the game, and then when you loose you can just say “FUCK. OH well this game is a piece of shite anyway”. There is a certain allure to a game that perfectly manages those experiences and the MW franchise certainly had that…
I don’t care why it is the way it is. I care if it’s fun or not.
It’s tough to make games, so I cut the Devs a lot of slack. Starfield was definitely too ambitious for the engine they built it on but it’s probably the best it could possibly be… With that engine.