i'm still playing Baldur's Gate

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.

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

The 12 hours tutorial might be off-putting for people who aren't Bethesda pay piggies

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

Is the game that much blander or does Internet culture just move on that much faster these days?

I haven't seen a shortage of BG3 memes, so I'm going to assume this is a Skills Issue on behalf of Bethesda Studios.

its fallout 4 but with a worse story, bland art direction, and even less character

also its wild that they didnt think of making vehicles like rovers and stuff to ride around planets on in their nasa punk setting. no, you gotta run for an hour to get anywhere because your oxygen depletes (that is, until you become a space wizard and get the oxygen replenishment spell, and cast it 24/7 as a necessity)

A couple of buddies of mine play it and every time they tell me or show me something about it I'm just like....alright. I think it's just an incredibly mid game.

No. I've not seen anyone even really talk about it, except to shit-talk it. I've seen people comparing it unfavorably to Cyberpunk 2077, and you know what? Yeah. CP2077 has a ton of issues but it looks good and the combat is actually fun and exciting. Starfield looks like crap. Not just technically, the visual design is incredibly bland, and there's literally nothing about the boring, empty setting they've created that is compelling or even original. They steal the inciting incident from Mass Effect and make it more boring. They undercut themselves everywhere by not allowing you to get into a ship, take off, and fly to another planet and land on it.

It's just so fucking bland and I've seen nobody have anything good to say on it.

I think less people were interested in it in the first place. Bethesda squandered a ton of goodwill with the shameless cash-grabbing in Fallout 76, and the new IP looked incredibly tepid.

Starfield is soulless. The term is cliched so sorry about that. But it feels like the writers, the quest designers etc. could not be arsed to do their job well which is cool. I support workers collecting free paychecks. But the game is nowhere near as good as it was hyped. The only saving grace is that mod support is coming next year which could be interesting.

Tldr: starfield is a shit game

You can only coast off the goodwill generated by Morrowind for so long.

It didn't help that 2023 is the best year for games since 1998. It's tough to slog through the early hours of Starfield when you've already got two or three recent S-rank games to play instead

The little I've seen and the lot I've heard make it seem like the game is just bad. The only video I remember is someone doing a mass shooting where only a few of the npcs reacted slowly. The streamers I watched played it for like one day because they got sponsored before going back to whatever else they were playing, which for one was a third playthrough of Bg3 before playing Cyberpunk.

The top streamers for it are in ~250 range lol, I have no interest in even pirating it and cannot imagine I ever will.

Fallout and Skyrim had the benefit of being part of a much beloved franchise. Among Us didn't really take off until two years after release because kids were playing it during lockdown. Elden Ring got major hype for being a collaboration between the creators of some of the biggest franchises in TV and video games in the 2010s.

Starfield certainly has the benefit of being the new thing from a well-known studio. However, it's also a "new" IP from a studio that isn't known for making their own IP and is known for crummy writing on the IP they own. Not to mention that there's just...so many more video games these days.

None of this is to say I think Starfield is any good. I haven't played it, but I have seen others play it and it looks real boring. Being the next big thing just wasn't in the cards.

Game fuckin sucks lmao

The gameplay is mediocre as fuck but I probably would have played through at least the main quest if the worldbuilding wasn't so damn boring. Like it's literally the single most uninteresting SciFi setting I've ever seen, it's almost as if ChatGPT generated the whole setting.

I haven't actually seen anything pop up talking about starfield for a while yet BG3 memes pop up all over the place. It's not a bad game but not good either. Playing it feels about as engaging as my dayjob once you get past oggling at the pretty bits.

Fallout 3 and Skyrim were more popular for their time due to it being quite unique and new. The idea that you could go off and carve our your own story in these big worlds filled with content was a novel thing not done often. Now open world boring shite is everywhere and the Bethesda formula looks really outdated in comparison.

Also I'm yet to actually find any joy in exploration in starfield. Skyrim had a crap story but it had a very nice world to roleplay in. Starfield seems to have none of that.

starfield is fucking dogshit and confirmed my suspicion that bethesda has no idea what makes their games good.

sandbox is only good if the worldbuilding accompanying it is top notch, and bethesda have been watering down their writing ever since morrowind came out

On one hand, yes, the internet does move really fast nowadays and a bunch of other really good games are out this year.

But on the other hand...

All of the companions are at best boring and samey or at worst really irritating so the people who play Bioware+Bethesda games to romance the NPCs aren't hopping onto playing the game.

The game is like. stunningly, jaw droppingly ugly for a 2023 AAA game and runs like shit on top of that so nvidia paypig people who play games to record their gorgeous 4k 60fps videos aren't making a lot of buzz around the game.

The creation kit equivalent isn't out yet (I'm not sure if there's even a script extender yet) so the modding community can't sink their teeth into it yet. Like there are nudie mods but ngl the human models are so ugly it seems like more of a token effort until the modkit gets released.

So yeah even if there's really baller story beats or meme worthy dialogue there's not enough dedicated eyes on it.

I uninstalled pretty fast, it just felt like Fallout 4 again.

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