Games

The story is bad, the ship’s weapons selection is terrible, the outposts are almost useless, the temples are ridiculous, the powers are mostly unnecessary and soooo mmmaaannnyyy loading screens….

one guy who loves trying to bend sandbox simulations to the point of breaking and a gal who writes comedy

Abby and Vinny from Giant Bomb Beastcast

It's not that it's outdated, oblivion does this sort of thing. It's that starfield just isn't good, and the older titles are better

It was incredibly mid. For something Bethesda hyped for over half a decade they sure made a bland game. Throwing aside all of the incredibly dated gameplay, you hit the nail on the head. It was boring

You can tell every faction was decided by a corporate committee inside Bethesda and Microsoft. They couldn't be too risky, couldn't come close to possibly offending one person or risk having slightly fewer gamers. That results in a boring as hell game. Everyone was too goddamn nice in the game. No one ever got mad at you. You could punch someone in the face and the response would be "hey, that's not nice" and then they would continue on. Hold on there don't want to possibly scare off a potential customer by having a realistic situation there.

Modders could fix that, but why bother making it a mod when you could just make a whole new game from scratch for just a little more work?

Freelancer would have been fresher in memory 15 years ago, and that's one that had seamless intra-system travel. Gameplay in Freelancer even flowed better than NMS for getting from orbit to orbit and having encounters or discoveries along the way. It just didn't have the on-foot gameplay. I had the same problem with loading screens in Everspace 2. Killed the flow. Whoever tries to do this again is going to have to make sure transitions are minimal.

And that's what I don't get about Starfield, conceptually. With this project scope, you're not competing well with NMS for ship-to-foot or orbit-to-surface transition, you're not doing better than Freelancer--a 20+ year old game--for all the in-space stuff, and the procgen hamstrings you with all the "Bethesda magic" their worlds are known for. It's like someone said "let's do Daggerfall in space" and went rigid top-down design with it, retrofitting whatever they could along the way to make a functional game around the procgen.

This is a limitation of the (ancient) engine the game is on, as I understand it.

Old engine isn't always bad. It is if you do like Todd and just slap more and more plugins and technology on top and call it a new engine, instead of fixing underlying issues or rewriting/updating old parts.

Which is why Starfield NPCs walk onto tables and become owls when the camera zooms into conversations, etc: It is the same code that is used in Skyrim and partly Oblivion. And Todd Howard doesn't want devs doing silly things like fixing twenty year old code, he wants new and bigger.

They changed the recipe. Skyrim, Fallout 3 and 4, Oblivion, and Morrowind all had something in common: handcrafted environments densely packed with points of interest.

Starfield used procedurally generated content. It generates abandoned mines and outposts from a tileset and then drops you in the literal desert between them.

The thing for me is that it's a game about a guild of explorers, and the game is all fast travel. The bits you do "explore" were soulless.

Fans patching the Bethesda games is as at least as old as Daggerfall, if not earlier. Daggerfall didn’t have Helseth and Barenziah as Dark Elves until fans fixed it. Pickpocketing in Morrowind is broken unless you use the code patch. The Oblivion leveling problem punishes you for playing the game.

Like every guide for every Bethesda game is going to start with download this unofficial patch, and the unofficial patches for the DLC, and this installer. They’ve relied on fans and treated the community like it’s an FOSS community, without realizing that without good product, the volunteers won’t come.

Because we all loved morrowind...

Coming from a long time fan of Bethesda RPGs They have gotten way too comfortable relying on radiant quests and proc gen content. Those aren’t inherently bad, but the way they were implemented in Starfield was. What’s so fun about landing on a planet that appears the same as another a few light years away and seeing the same fucking cryogenics lab with the same layout, items, lore logs, and enemy placement? Chasing the same bounties for a paltry sum of credits (not that you’ll need them it’s easy to break the economy) or legendary loot that you’ll likely just sell (for credits you won’t use)? There are cool things like ship building that could be further fleshed out but so much of the game ended up undercooked and uninspired (space travel with your ship was a glorified screensaver in a game about space traversal for Christ’s sake).

I think if Starfield had come out 10 years ago it would have wowed people and been a classic. But now it just seems dated when you have other games doing RPG better (Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher 3, Baldurs Gate 3) and open world space better (No Mans Sky).

Starfield doesnt do RPG as good as those games, nor does it do open world space as well as No Mans Sky. I've heard it described as being as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle, and that doesnt seem far off to me.

I really hope Bethesda have paid attention and dont make the same kind of mistakes with Elder Scrolls VI. Big and empty is not the way to go.

There is just so much potential... squandered.

Silly example- why are there elevators and LOADING SCREENS in New Atlantis - if you have enough jetpack or just abuse TCL, you can walk around the entirety of New Atlantis, without a single loading screen.

But for some reason Bethesda decided it needed some loading screens for no good reason whatsoever.

Damn dude, I'm glad you got so much out of FO4 I did one playthrough when it released and tried to play it again this year, barely got into it.

That's when Bethesda died for me, didn't find Skyrims simplifications all that good either but it was still a fun game

Feels like Bethesdas modus operandi is to make a game that appeals to everyone and that's unfortunately coming at the cost of its established fan base