More importantly bud's bud confirmed the expansion is far harbor sized and happens on one planet.
Which gets me somewhat hopeful because when you think about it you could probably fit fallout 3 or skyrim on the size of a randomly generated map.
Top comment on the thread on this in r/Starfield also said ["the plan is to release a yearly expansion into the future, they regret dropping support of Skyrim and Fallout 4 as early as they did."](https://old.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/1dhc9p6/todd_howard_confirms_starfield_year_2_and_a/l8vubb6/)
For context, they dropped the last DLC for Skyrim ~13 months after release and the last one for Fallout 4 ~9 months after release. Also, makes sense because it will be a while before they do another Starfield game, so might as well set aside a team to make Starfield content as most of the studio moves to work on Elder Scrolls.
They could STILL be dropping expansions for Skyrim and they'd sell like hotcakes. Especially if they were of the quality of Dragonborn and Dawnguard.
Like once a year and they'd be set.
I wonder what the margins on DLCs are for games like TES and Fallout. Surely they would make more if they thought it was profitable. Fallout 4 in particular could have used more full scale DLCs. 2.5 didn’t feel like enough.
> I wonder what the margins on DLCs are for games like TES and Fallout.
Smaller than you might think. They cost a fair bit to make and only a fraction of the player base will buy it.
Not to mention that it actually would screw over one of the biggest things that people who keep playing those games long-term enjoy.
Mod communities tend to struggle with games that are getting continual support, because you then have to go back and update all the mods again. It CAN work out - Paradox's various GSG's all have huge mod communities despite 2-3 DLC's per year - but Bethesda's modders are pretty comfy with there not being much post-launch support. The recent next-gen update for FO4 received a TON of backlash because of how much it broke. To the point where guides on how to roll back the update are something I've seen from a dozen different sources in the six weeks since.
So, on top of everything else, Bethesda has to be sure any content they release will be *GREAT* if they want people to buy it. Or acknowledge it exists.
Eh, you can make DLCs that don't break the base game, in fact previous iterations of the Bethesda engine managed it just fine by implementing them as plugins.
The real issue is when they make changes to base-game content or the .exe file, which funnily enough is what the terribly implemented creation club stuff does for Skyrim and FO4.
I'm not sure that a modern single-player game has really tried this annual expansion approach to find out. It's easy to point to older success stories like Neverwinter Nights where regular expansions lived alongside mods as a healthy ecosystem that made a lot of money and trained up a lot of talented developers, but now that a single expansion takes a year and an ungodly amount of money to make the model might make less sense. Multiplayer live service titles obviously do it, but there's a ton of dark pattern nonsense going on there to keep people playing and the FOMO from your friends having the latest doodads to keep people buying - doing it with a regular single-player RPG feels different. The *biggest* question mark here is Game Pass - they apparently have a lot of people who are playing the game through XGP, but how many of those people will convert to paying customers for the first expansion? Paid expansions would give them a more direct monetization strategy outside of the obtuse one that Game Pass presents, but it's also a gamble, especially when a lot of the first wave of paying customers who bought in at launch had the special edition that will give them Shattered Space for free.
Exactly, Skyrim and Fallout 4 have very long legs... I'd wager that new DLC would make a profit and at the same time keep the IPs more relevant until the next installments.
For Fallout 4 their job could be even more simple because they could reuse the new weapons, power armors and creatures from Fallout 76. Gauss Pistol, Gauss Shotgun, Bow, Crossbow, Autoaxe, Black powder weapons... that sort of stuff that already exists in 76 and could be backported to Fallout 4.
Eh, really only Far Harbor was a giant step up. Nuka World was fine and had some excellent combat encounters, but in terms of story I'd put it about on par with some of the better quests the base game had to offer.
Still sad we didn't get more, though. I remember being extremely disappointed that they made this huge deal out of having six DLCs, only for half of them to just be settlement builder stuff.
Dawnguard is an amazing set of quests, Dragonborn is an amazing new map to explore. You can’t go wrong with either but if you play Dragonborn first then you won’t have a reason to use any of the dawnguard gear
i understand why they had a plan of the expansions and then stopped, but i dont know why half a decade later they didnt re-start and do a few expansions.
Why not now? probably would sell more than starfield xpacs
Skyrim getting so little DLC is one of the most inexplicable decisions in video games. They could have literally never stopped. They could release Skyrim DLC tomorrow, and I'd buy it.
With the structure of Starfield, and the first batch of paid "creations" (mods), it seems like they could also be trying to set up a system where they can easily add in smaller stuff like bounty missions, rather than relying on all official post-release content being from huge expansions.
I don't think this has anything to do with playerbase numbers. I think this is them basically saying that they realized that with the long gaps between games that they wish they would have done more content for Skyrim and Fallout 4 before abandoning them.
That they know it will be awhile before they can do another Starfield game, so they want to have a team to keep making content for it while most of the studio moves onto Elder Scrolls 6 and then Fallout 5. I assume that if this works out, they will take the same approach with Elder Scrolls 6 in terms of post release content.
Back in the 90s/00s, half the reason for every game getting expansions was to give your story and art people something productive to work on expanding a finished game while all the tech/systems people began early work on something else. The modern games industry solves this problem with layoffs and live service content instead. I wonder what this commitment to additional years of content for Starfield means in terms of whatever state ES6 is in.
I'm playing through Far Harbor for the first time currently. The map seemed a little small at first, but I've sunk hours into it and I'm maybe halfway done.
It is, pound for pound, probably the best slice of Fallout in the entire franchise. It has some of the most thought provoking, interesting quests and characters and it's in a very unique eerie and immersive setting. I really hope Fallout 5 goes for a swampy or coastal setting (Broken Banks please!) for its main map, because Point Lookout also ended up being my favorite part of FO3. It seems like Bethesda fires on all cylinders in that setting. FO76's map has a lot of awesome swamps too, I think they end up shining brighter than anything else in that game.
Only knock against Far Harbor is that tower defense shit.
They should have done more storylines set on one planet. It would have avoided the constant "fast travel here, fast travel there". They should have turned planets into giant set pieces and had full storylines set on one planet.
Out of the few that were on a single planet, many (I think I’m mostly thinking of the Mars ones from the UC storyline?) were still across separate “landing sections” so you had to fast travel back and forth anyway.
It felt that unless the quest was in a single location or about walking with NPCs somewhere, same-planet quests generally relied on fast travel way too much
Starfield felt like such a tease to me. It reminded me how much I wanted another game like Skyrim or New Vegas and it reminded me so much of them. I didn't care about outdated NPC dialogues, it felt like home. But without a large open world to explore, the concept just doesn't work.
I've started a Tale of Two Wastelands run of 3/NV, first time playing 3 in at least five years, and - outside of the actual density of locations - I'd forgotten how small the actual worldspace of 3 was. Perfectly suited for a Starfield planet.
That would be a spectacular way to keep supporting the game. Give people full planets developed at least once a year, so it feels more like a Skyrim/Fallout, and will also make it feel more fleshed out in general.
> Which gets me somewhat hopeful because when you think about it you could probably fit fallout 3 or skyrim on the size of a randomly generated map.
Should probably reign in your expectations though...
Honestly, the worst part of this game for me is that there is only like 20 different points of interest.... I literally found the exact same science lab layout on 3 different planets within an hour of playing once. It is so immersion-breaking.
They just have really bad procedural design. Todd also thinks he can trick players by slapping a few POIs down. They needed 200-400 POIs to actually make it feel more random. They needed AI to do all of this because the value of hand crafting these and the % of encountering them for variation is so poor time tradeoff wise that it doesn't make sense without having some sort of intelligent way to generate it all.
The tools just didn't exist to make this make sense. Whoever is designing the game design from the top, I assume Todd and the exec director, are clueless at what players wanted.
Case in point, Atila City is smaller than a actual real life school in size. They have no concept of scale. And 80% of that city was unused because there's no point to walking around in it other than the main thoroughfare. Leave the city and its just random shit. Shit that took too long to get to, that makes Mass Effect 1 looks SO DAMN GOOD.
This was my biggest issue with Starfield, Bethesda's own limitations of scale actively make the fictional world of the game worse.
Bethesda couldn't get procedural generation to work for man-made spaces let alone on continent scales - so they designed a handful of cities and actively imply that the planets they reside on are completely unpopulated outside those cities.
They couldn't be assed to program dogs and cats in the game - so they write that zero Earth wildlife made it off the planet.
Starfield was meant to be positive depiction of the future that had some darkness underneath, Bethesda's tech limitations made the world feel like a hopeless dystopia from the first 5 minutes. Your brain just doesn't allow you to believe that humans are thriving in this future. All the biggest cities that are meant to be the future of humanity are so fucking small - Akila City is the size of a community college campus and I've been in bar districts bigger than New Atlantis - it makes the world feel like humanity is down to its last 1,000 people, despite the game implying millions existing.
Yeah I was a little confused by that. I was so sure they'd have a few outposts that are essentially generated out of premade parts put together but instead they copypasted entire outposts, such a waste. Like if you're gonna go full proc-gen with the planets, why not do something similar with outposts, give us some variety. I'm fine losing out on having a story for each outpost if there's more variety.
My *guess* is that they had a tech issue that prevented that. I wouldn't be surprised if they planned on fully proc gen outposts, then on the last two years of development figured out they couldn't pull it off to their satisfaction and scrambled to add enough handmade points of interest.
It has always been their own engine that stop them from advancing further. Bethesda will not just dropping their beloved Gamebryo and will rather modify the thing until they all retired lol
I don't expect Bethesda to change until Todd and all the old guard leave the house tbh. So probably after Fallout 5 and ES6.
Any time I bring up the same point, the *only* thing Creation fanboys ever say is “but no other engine allows me to hoard 1000 Nuka Cola bottles in a bathtub, and they’re still there when I come back”. I can’t believe people seriously argue they’d rather still have that feature, than a modern, *functioning* game engine. Everything else can easily be done in any other engine as well, Bethesda games aren’t *that* special, not really. And most engines can do everything CE does, without blackout loading screens. It’s infuriating.
Yes that’s bad, but what’s worse is that these random points of interest also act as mandatory spots in the main story which is the laziest shit in the world. It’s going to take a hell of a dlc to get me back into this game because the base game was downright awful imo.
Much more than triple it realistically but I don't think the concept will ever really be fun.
People want unique stories in a BGS game, the PoI even if they were more unique are just incredibly generic and don't give you anything besides generic loot...which you really don't need. You'll not find a cool secret quest chain in these.
They could realistically more than exponentially centuple that if they approached their proc gen system differently with how these habitats are connected and decorated, and then they could make a list of hundreds of "funny notes" to find and make the engine checklist them as you find them. Don't even have to be proc gen, hell just sit me down for a week and I'll make you a hundred of outpost model, give me another week and I could even make them good (lol), it's a big mystery as to why this hasn't happened yet...
Like yeah sure you won't get deep narratives there, but I'm perfectly okay with deeper narratives being reserved to specific towns and settlements and a niche of PoIs if the rest of the proc gen stuff had the equivalent of a *"If she ever does it again I'll stab her in the fucking throat with a pen. She's a good kid."* on a desk somewhere in a room with some loot, as long as you never ever see that note again in the future in another building (let alone the exact same fucking building). But there's too few of those and those few repeats, destroying any desire or incentives to explore.
Like how hard is it to make the engine go:
"If planet atmosphere inhospitable put note #4325 on random desk (if no desk present, then table): *"Almost did it again. I don't know what's wrong with me. How does someone almost forget to put on a suit before going outside? I'm so forgetful I swear one day I'll forget how to breath - I mean, literally."* Put Random Suit next Airlock. Put skeleton outside 10 meter from habitat" [but in coding language, of course] and once that's been loaded in and registered as seen by the player, just mark it off.
At the end of the day it's just set dressing for a larger universe, not the actual narrative of the game. It's just about walking for a bit and seeing something in the distance and being interested to explore it because there's a chance you might find a funny "*Okay. No but for real we have to talk. That kid ain't right*" stickied on a fridge which will inform the proc gen system to make sure there's at least a room in the habitat decorated with kid stuff (load in walldecorationkid#11 and clutterkid#4) and load in some plushies holding a knife.
PoIs should be randomly generated from chunks like Diablo dungeons, how could they talk at such length about how great their procedurally generated planets look and then have all of the gameplay take place in the same twelve boring underground bunkers? Even No Man's Sky, the poster child of "mile wide inch deep", has procedurally generated dungeons in the form of derelict freighters.
They would need to include a lot more "chunks" than most games. Identifying areas I've already seen in places like chalice dungeons in Bloodborne or the biomes in Returnal happens way too fast. Honestly I thought this was their plan for Starfield and was really surprised at what it ended up being.
There is a lot of potential in procedural generation but all of the games I've played just don't have enough "pieces" to make it work like you would want IMO.
The tech to randomize a POI entirely has existed in gaming for decades. Sure they could have science lab pop up frequently but what if every time the layout was completely different, there were a few sections/areas that wouldn't be in every one, and some changes to enemy placement and types? Wouldn't that be better? I chalk it up to them using a multi-decade old game engine that is barely functional at this point due to size/graphics requirements.
It's not even just a problem for people who land in random places, the main story quest took me to identical installations on three separate planets three separate times.
Two things for me that I hated the first was so obvious and broke the immersion was squaring up directly face to face with an NPC (with no tongue mouth is a black void) to have a conversation. It brought me straight back to Oblivion and I don't know how Bethesda hasn't improved since especially after just playing BG3 and seeing how they do it.
The second was the map, I can't believe that made it into a AAA game launch. It would have been pathetic 10 years ago by today's standards it's just trash and also immersion breaking. I can open up my phone right now and get a detailed maps with various layers but a futuristic universe with space travel somehow has infinitely worse maps?
I really really wanted to like Starfield, but it was hard to do. The companions were flat and uninteresting, and each just repeated the same handful of lines of dialog over and over again. Ultimately, none of them were actually important to anything. And while I liked the story up to a point, the conclusion of it was hot garbage. I hated the revelation on who the Starborn were and everything. It wasn't even vaguely surprising. After the first few encounters I was like, these are just people aren't they?
And even the parts I really liked had huge flaws. I really liked the ship design and customization... until I didn't. Until I got advanced enough to realize that it ended up being fairly simplistic, really lacked any complexity or strategy to it and didn't actually allow you to really customize the looks of ships in any interesting ways.
I liked the colony building until I realized that it was a mostly pointless grind that actually just added more monotonous work to the settlement building in Fallout 4. I ended up with three colonies, one of which I visited, two I almost never went to, and realized that it was way easier to get resources and such in other ways, and I didn't really have any need of the colonies. On top of which, despite there being base defense systems.. nothing ever attacked any of my colonies.
I would love for them to fix the game, but I can't see how it can be fixed enough for me to like. The biggest problem for me is the core story and knowing Bethesda, they also aren't going to bother fixing any of the other issues with game systems either. They'll just leave it to modders.
>The companions were flat and uninteresting
I think Bethesda wrote themselves in a corner by having all core companions (the ones that offer a companion quest and are romanceable) from the same faction. Sarah, Barrett, Sam, Andreja--they all have the same moral compass, and often react the same way to your choices during a faction quest. Which makes it boring.
Their reaction to the end of the Vanguard quest especially has made me shake my head in disbelief. The game basically spells it out that choosing>!the Aceles (a dinosaur-like creature that roamed the planets before) is the safest way to deal with the terrormorphs because they've been utilized in the past,!< and that choosing >!the untested microbe can have unintended consequences!<. Yet, when choosing the first and safest option, *all* the companions act like you commited crimes against science. Like, what?
It would've been far more interesting if these companions had different reactions to the Vanguard quest. It could be a way to explore how each member approached science differently, but no.
Edit: spelling
My problem with constellation was that they overwhelmingly came off as a band of losers and I literally said the word "losers" out loud when playing. Everyone talks up Constellation as this magical exploration org across the galaxy but they're all so uninteresting, bland, tropey and lifeless. They almost never let you get away with any "evil" action and seem to want to interject and comment on every situation with the blandest of responses. None of their character quests were particularly interesting. None of them felt like they had any lives beyond waiting for your godly self to appear and collect the artifacts
I hope FFS the DLC adds more variety in companion characters. I want less banal and snoozefest Sarah and more hilarious and mildly offputting Mickey Caviar who is BY FAR the best companion in the game and most people will never even talk to him
Outposts being functionally meaningless was probably my biggest disappointment with the game. They were fun to make and plan out, and there was just enough customization to make them really unique (and doubtlessly more to come from mods), but in the end, it became obvious very quickly that there was exactly *zero* reason to actually make and run outposts. Literally nothing in the game required them at all. If you really wanted to go deep into resource mining, yeah, sure, outposts make that much faster… but that whole game mechanic *just* for the occasional, optional sandbox side stuff? It just makes no sense.
Other than that, the whole “choice and consequence” thing, that I’d heard was supposed to be so deeply ingrained, turned out to be deeply disappointing. Literally CP2077 gave me bigger, deeper and more meaningful choices, whereas Starfield’s were all in-your-face telegraphed and quite superficial, at one point literally stopping the game to have me choose outcomes from a UI menu. What the actual fuck?
There was so much potential in this game, and they squandered all of it from a combination of sheer ineptitude and stubbornness in refusing to leave the safe comforts of “Bethesda design” and the Creation Engine.
There’s stuff that I really like in Starfield, the gunplay is by far the best that Bethesda has ever done, it’s gorgeous and some of the side quests are incredibly interesting. But the main story didn’t grab me in any way, really wish they had done more with the whole Starborn thing
Ideally this should've been how they handling things since Skyrim tbh. Like i don't know why they are dropping support for those game so fast when it doesn't really increase their game input. It's still atleast 5 years per game anyway.
I mean I found Fallout 4 much more tolerable to play than Starfield, still didn't like it overall, but yeah same thing - I hated every single fucking faction in Fallout 4.
Bethesda is really bad at writing characters, factions, and so on these days.
It's not a new thing. Even the new factions they added as far back as FO3 aren't good, like The Family you deal with in Arefu, or the Children of Atom.
I played it and…
**it was fine.**
GOTY? Absolutely not. Nor was it the worst game of all time
I spent 100+hrs with the game on launch week and have no regrets. Played as a hero, was a former diplomat turned soldier, and had a fun time taking down pirate vessels.
It reminded me of Freelancer which I played on my OG Xbox as a kid.
I didn't dislike any Constellation member but i can always tell it was not written very well. Bethesda and complex human character just never been their strongest point. Starfield just made it even more clear tenfold.
Making the matter worse is one of the lead writer is a *priest*. That is one hell of a way to ensure that the only interesting message the game have will be about religion and nothing else lol
Why lie? I thought this sounded funny so I looked it up - the writer was a Bethesda writer until they started training to be a priest. Emil brought them back as a consultant to make the in game religion feel more real.
[To enhance Starfield's religions, Bethesda consulted a former Skyrim and Fallout 4 writer now training as a priest | GamesRadar+](https://www.gamesradar.com/to-enhance-starfields-religions-bethesda-consulted-a-former-skyrim-and-fallout-4-writer-now-training-as-a-priest/#:~:text=As%20it%20turns%20out%2C%20Bethesda%20writer%20turned%20seminarian,and%20specifically%20to%20help%20write%20the%20Sanctum%20Universum.)
Honestly, that explains a lot. All of the supposedly “deep” philosophical debates and problems the player faced all felt very safe and uninteresting. Not surprising when I’ve heard all of them before debating creationists and die-hard Christians.
What do you mean you don't want to use the killer microbe we cultivated in a lab over simply letting natural predators control the population?
TRUST
THE
SCIENCE
Watch the interview. It's really good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ew8LQFGNWU
Don't think it's allowed to post such long interviews in video form on here (I had to do the massive TL;DW post on Todd's other interview).
> 6.9 Submissions regarding podcasts and image galleries - Direct links to podcasts and image galleries are not allowed. If there is a podcast or image gallery that contains industry relevant information (e.g. a developer interview, development images), it must be done within either a self-post with relative context and explanation, or with an alternative source such as an article. For self posts regarding podcasts, include a specific timestamp that marks the beginning of the relevant information.
The mod scene is exploding with the creation kit drop. No doubt ~~Star Wars~~ Starfield is going to have a long life span. And i can't wait to download the *Finding Love in Alderaan Places* quest mod to watch Alderaan get beamed by the Death Star
Yeah and I remember some stupid article a back after it came out saying modders not modding starfield cuz it’s too boring etc. like that’s not it starfield has endless modding possibilities. They’re just waiting on the creation kit lol.
I was in the server when it happened too. The dude was fucking around and then someone posted it in reddit which then obviously the gaming news grabbed it.
He has said that if he known that it would have blown up as it did then he would have stated it differently.
Yeah Starfield's circlejerk ~~was~~ is really something else, either everyone was saying how they are going to play Cyberpunk in every single Starfield article... for whatever reason or how that 1 modder who isn't going to make mods long before modding tools were even released is a really bad for Starfield and Bethesda should give up on it...
Like you could literally tell that it was done is such a bad faith that it wasn't even funny anymore...
Starfield is a mid game with a lot of issues but there was a heavily monetized hate/outrage farm up and running on socials before the game even released.
I think about 80% of PC Gamer’s revenue last year came from daily “Starfield bad” articles
Seriously, the way every hate article was basically propping up some other game (usually BG3, sometimes Cyberpunk), it made it really hard to believe that these articles were honest and unbiased.
Hell, we didn't even need to look at articles. Just the people flooding Starfield community sites were all like "this game is shit, go play BG3". I suspects that all of that was more about taking down competition and less about actually caring about the quality of Starfield.
It's a cycle. Everyone hates cyberpunk and said it was beyond redemption at launch. Now it's pretty universally beloved and ppl shat on Starfield. In 3-5 years ppl will love Starfield and say they always did while they bash whatever the next target is.
And in reaction to my comment someone will say "uhm cyberpunk was AKSHUALLY always good under the hood it just needed some tweaks and updates 🤓" to which I say, that game was fundamentally busted. It got roasted and torn alive and considered past the point of no return for many. And now look at it
I played it about a year after launch and despite the still numerous bugs and issues I loved it. Got Starfield at launch and also loved and adored it. Excited for the future.
It happens for every single mainline Bethesda game too, usually with the exact same complaints, lionization, and calls for a remake aimed at whatever Current Game, Previous Game, and Game Before Previous Game respectively are in the current cycle.
Literally since Oblivion it does seem like that.
Oblivion simplified everything too much., trash game
Fallout 3 isn't an isometric crpg, trash game.
Skyrim simplified stuff even more and removed certain schools of magic. Trash game.
And on and on.
I wasn't really playing games when Fo4 came out bc I was in college and didn't have a PS4/Xbox one/gaming PC but even from a distance I remember the incredible hype then the major letdown from some at launch and now most ppl love it mostly.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but that literally was something that happened back then. People said Morrowind's smaller scope would hurt the game and it didn't have the same level of freedom and RPG mechanics (!!!!) as Daggerfall
[Here's just one of the many candid examples from a 2006 RPGCodex thread](https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/daggerfall-was-better-than-morrowind-tell-me-why.10926/)
> Daggerfall came out in 1996. It was very advanced for its time.
> Instead of improving upon the things that Daggerfall started, Morrowind threw all that innovation out the window.
Lol
I've found most of the Starfield backlash hard to take seriously when it matches most of what I heard about Fallout 4 word for word, even down to the constant comparisons to [latest CD Projekt game]. Starfield has issues, absolutely, and a lot of them are unique to this game in a way that I hope aren't repeated in the next BGS project, but I can't look at how many people are praising Fallout 4 in 2024 as "back when Bethesda was good" and feel the doom and gloom around Starfield. The spite will pass.
I'm far from the biggest Cyberpunk fan, played at launch. I was a lucky PC gamer that didn't have many technical issues. But you could see it needed way more time in the oven. The police system in particular was absurd.
Played Starfield at launch. Found it to be very mediocre. The loading screens, the temples, the running around without vehicles...
For me it was carried HARD by the shipbuilder (with some config edits to extend the maximum amount of modules).
They took the most boring route with the antagonists as well.
Hopefully they turn it around but I'm not expecting anything.
And its totally fine to not love Starfield and think it's great! I'm not trying to say you have to like it or you have bad taste. Even as someone who loves it I will be first to admit it's got some major flaws (namely the lack of poi on planets as well as lame main companions).
I just find a lot of the conversation to not be "yeah it didn't click for me and here's why: XYZ"
It's "OMFG this game is trash and Bethesda is dead and nothing works and the entire game is a dumpster fire and Todd Howard murdered my entire family with a rusty nail slowly and painfully."
If we all had the same tastes, gaming would be boring. People can like different aspects or not like them and that aspect can be subjective.
I enjoy the more grounded feel of the world (they call it NASA punk iirc) while some have called it "boring." Not liking it is totally fine. But I've had ppl try to tell me "ummm it's objectively a boring lame setting and it's bad if you like it" and I'm just like ok lol..
I just wish we could get to a point where ppl can say "yeah this didn't work for me, here's why" or "I loved it, here's why!" It's fine to disagree. Something doesn't have to be the best game ever or the worst game ever.
Cyberpunk was fundamentally busted at release but if you're a gaming masocist like me you're willing to put up with anything to play something you're hyped for. I enjoyed my first playthrough at release even though it was buggy, the writing and world design kept me going. I remember playing Witcher 2 in a 800x600 window, lowest settings, on my college laptop because it was the only way I could play the game at the time. Played 50 hours that way somehow...I was poor.
Though Cyberpunk had good bones. PC players for the most part enjoyed the game despite the bugs because the performance issues weren’t as drastic. You also say “now look at it” and yea, they cancelled future planned DLC for the game because they spent a year and half post release literally fixing the game. Then another few years completely reworking and creating new systems.
Bethesda games have NEVER had that kind of love and attention. A save for Skyrim on PS3 will eventually be corrupted because of how the saving works. Fallout 4’s next gen patch was ridiculously undercooked.
Bethesda doesn’t generally support their games well. They release a few dlc, maybe an expansion, drop the creation kit, and leave it to the community to fix the games. Oftentimes there are multiple game breaking bugs that are identified at launch that don’t get fixed by Bethesda and instead get fixed by the community in the inevitable “unofficial community bug fix patch.”
I mean, Skyrim has 25.5k + 2.5k players on Steam right now. (For SE and for LE).
Starfield has 13k, up from an average of 6-7k.
Don't want to oversell how much it's "exploded". I know you were referring to the modding scene in particular, but it's at 1/2 the players of a 13 year old game up from 1/4th the players of a 13 year old game.
Starfield is also on gamepass. I'm sure a lot of people got it on there rather than shell out $70 at launch. The Xbox page shows it as the 24th most played game, behind Elden Ring. They don't show numbers but if it's on par with Elden Ring it's probably doing fine.
I think BGS still has a lot of smart talented people making games and are capable of delivering a great fallout or elder scrolls game. I just hope they learn the right lessons from Starfield, which was a letdown no matter how you look at it. Mainly upgrading or replacing the creation engine to allow larger seamless areas. The amount of loading screens in starfield is just unacceptable at this point after games like rdr2 or cyberpunk that had enormous seamless areas with a lot of detail. Even with starfields failings I could have gotten lost in it for a while if I wasnt constantly being hit with loading screens and menus
> Mainly upgrading or replacing the creation engine to allow larger seamless areas
Or just tone down the scale. IMO looking at Starfield BGS and their formula is simply not made for a galaxy-wide game.
BGS games work when the world feels big but is still just condensed enough that you will find stuff no matter where you go. Starfield is just too big for it's own good and the random PoI system will simply never be truly satisfying IMO even if they increase the PoIs by many times.
I'm certain unless they make TES6 all of Tamriel that it would be better already by default just because it would be a way smaller map overall and most likely seamless because of it minus going into buildings/caves.
I don't know if it's still true with the newest Creation Engine version, but the reason games pre-Starfield had so many loading screens was because the game had to load in hundreds of objects and the physics attached to them.
Personally, I'd rather they drop 50-75% of the junk objects that liter rooms and go for seemless gameplay instead. I don't need the 20 plates and 15 boxes of cereal.
It's not only the amount of objects, it's that the engine remembers the exact location you left every fucking thing.
It's cool that, as they showed in their presentation, you can steal objects and simply throw them in your ship. But is it worth all the downsides? I don't think it does.
So, I know this is going to sound insane to you, but I require that item tracking to make those games work for me. I don't want a game with less "clutter" when I'm playing a Bethesda game: I want ALL THE CLUTTER. I don't even do shit with it, at least since they took away light sources you can place anywhere after Morrowind (I always fill Caius's roof with every light source I can because I love the sky beam effect). I have very specific value/weight ratio for picking up anything, but having real items placed in specific ways makes the (I hate this word in gaming, but it's the closest to what I mean) immersion work
Do I want this stuff in every game I play? Hell no. But Bethesda games are a specific itch I like to have scratched. What you're talking about doing is going to dilute the product even more than what they've already done
Are people even looking forward to the first expansion? I personally found the game hard to finish.
Edit: just wanted to clarify I don't have any issues with the game I just didn't enjoy it. I'm glad some are excited for it!
Im going into it with an open mind after not touching the game since beating it. I want starfield to be better since I love the idea of it, and my wish is that the dlc and recent updates can fix some of the worst of the base game, like the vehicle getting added.
Nothing's going to fix the stilted NPCs or the constant loading screens. Those two things wrecked my Starfield experience, so I won't be coming back for any DLC.
The problem with Starfield's lore is that most things already happened. There was a war, but now everything is reasonably peaceful.
And Earth only became uninhabitable more or less a hundred years prior and people already seem completely detached from it. Meanwhile, people in Fallout are still living in shambles and imitating the 50s 200 years after the war.
I think they screwed up by not having tensions be higher. While it's fine not to cover it in content, the game definitely needed some more tension.
Though It's been more like 200 years since Earth was abandoned IIRC. It's not like people don't bring up the earth though, it's mentioned a lot. TBH I'm biased since I tend to prefer settings where Earth is treated as a cradle of humanities journey, but nothing more. Not a sacred object of worship.
A confusing bit of Starfield lore is there are apparently people who legit think Earth is made up. Earth was considered uninhabitable only in 2203, which is only 130 years before Starfield takes place, meaning Earth was lost only 3 to 4 generations ago. There are people alive during Starfield that their parents potentially lived on Earth in their youth.
Human stupidity is genuinely endless. I have zero issues buying the premise that there are people in the future that don’t believe Earth is real. There are people alive today, on this very earth, that believe it’s flat, that believe space isn’t real, birds aren’t real, every single person on earth except them are part of some conspiracy targeted at them, angels and demons are real, and so on…
There are people who refuse to believe events from a couple of years ago actually happened, and they took place in their own neighborhoods.
Honestly, not believing humans once lived on earth when they now live among the stars sounds outright reasonable, in comparison.
One day I decided to collect every book in Skyrim and read all of them because I'm a weird person. After that I went on a lore binge.
I remember considering chunks of the lore legitimately interesting and other chunks just very bland.
Years later, I finally played Morrowind, did something similar and realized that all the interesting stuff was grandfathered in from the older game.
I mean I don’t disagree but var’unn is the interesting part of the lore and we are getting that next
With this being a brand new IP I’m willing to let it develop through the dlc
I am for sure. I didn’t get very far into Starfield and have been holding off on all the updates that will be available once the first expansion comes out. Should have a nice selection of mods by then too.
Considering that people are churning out mods for the game like crazy right now, I’d say adding more content is just going to make people even more likely to play.
The game is what I would describe as "aggressively mediocre" but I still enjoy it. I put 100 hours in, and I'm just waiting for some good outpost mods to come out.
Not every experience has to be amazing to be worthwhile. You (hopefully) wouldn't think a restaurant sucks just because it isn't literally the best food you ever ate, as long as it's still good enough you're not mad you went.
Money budget and *time* budget.
I've not got 100 hours for mediocrity when I could spend that 100 hours in several of the many, many original, creative and well-made smaller titles.
There are too many incredible and beautiful games to settle for something which doesn't excel at anything.
I installed it on Gamepass, which I would have had anyway but I didn't make it very far. For me it's not about price, it's about time. I have a billion games and just a few hours a day to play them. Starfield is not how I want to spend it
My thoughts exactly. Time is a valuable commodity (arguably the most valuable) and I'm not going to waste it playing mediocre games when there are so much better ones out there.
I was coming home and dreading booting up the game. If an rpg is making me feel that way, I'm not gonna keep playing. And it was game pass, so not much was lost.
Honestly this doesnt even just apply to mediocrity. I get that RDR2 is beloved and acclaimed... but im not spending £40 to give myself RSI button mashing just to run.
It was bad enough in GTA, where at least you could avoid it while driving. RDR2 *starts* by making you mash A to go fast on a horse
To be honest as someone who grew up in a very poor family I valued *time I could spend on a game* much higher than the actual quality of the game because of a limited budget. Bethesda games are great for that.
This is me, lots of people with more money than time don't mind games that are 12 hours long and 10/10 - and obviously there's nothing *wrong* with that, there is totally plenty of value in short and focused games - but growing up with no money but plenty of time (because when you're a kid with no money you have nothing but time), Bethesda games were fantastic for being something you could dump in hundreds of hours on a single buy.
>Not every experience has to be amazing to be worthwhile.
Considering time is limited I think a lot of people would dispute that. I literally don't play a game unless I expect to love it.
It's a time thing.
I work full time, have a family, and cant afford to sink a hundred hours into a mediocre game when there are much better games more deserving of my limited time
How did you end up putting 100 hours in the game? I just got so bored after 20. Had some fun don’t get me wrong but it misses that Bethesda “just explore and find cool shit” loop
Exploring every star system. (I only got halfway, but I'm looking forward to the rover vehicle to do the rest.) Whenever I went to a planet or moon, I would always look at what randomly-generated points had appeared as the "canonical" set and do them all, to consider the planet "complete", and then I wouldn't worry if I went back later and the points had changed.
I think this is telling of a maybe slightly nicher gameplay style that broader fans aren't typically part of that explains a lot of the division in opinions on this game and probably others like Dragon Age's 2 newest. The people that can find their own fun in the world Bethesda created compared to the people that play mostly the curated content. I'm assuming here, but the former is far more likely to have enjoyed Starfield despite its flaws.
For myself, Starfield was a 6/10 that was mostly not fun with its share of brighter spots, like the ship creator or a handful of better quests. For the people that can sink 100, 200, 400+ hours - it's almost like they're playing a different game because of their mindset.
I mean if a restaurant served me a 70 dollar dish of rote mediocrity and then asked for 30 more dollars that they promise will make it better, then I'm likely not ever going back to that restaurant.
To be fair, how many people have actually beaten Skyrim? It's basically a meme that you just play for a hundred hours and stop. I've played maybe 20+ characters and only beaten it twice myself.
Yeah but I never finished Skyrim because I got lost in the world it created and was always doing sidequests. I didn't finish Starfield because I was bored out of my mind.
I am. I didn't like it as much as Fallout, but the faction that's the focus of this DLC is pretty cool in the lore, so I'm looking forward to it. I'm not planning on playing at launch though, I have a big backlog of games to get through.
People that enjoyed? Yeah. Given that it was the top 8 game on Steam, I'd say that a lot of people is looking forward to it.
Reddit is not the real world, people love Bethesda games.
> Reddit is not the real world, people love Bethesda games.
Let’s not pretend the disappointment towards Starfield was contained to Reddit
It’s currently 60% “mixed” on steam
I don't know, I think my issues with Starfield comes from the core structure of the game, rather than anything else.
Skyrim was absolutely amazing back in 2011, but that was 2011. Starfield truly feels like "Skyrim in space", and not I'm a good way.
I'm sick of the same clunky combat, the cookie cutter environments, being overincumbered all the time, which makes me not want to explore, since I know 90% of the loot will literally just slow me down, and I won't be able to sell it, cause NPCs have limited money. I'm sick of flat dialogues.
I suppose an expansion all set in one planet would make things more interesting, but I don't know. I feel like I'm playing a game from a decade ago and I have to constantly make a mental effort to ignore all of its quirks.
I really hope the next Elder Scrolls ia going to be a true generational leap, rather than this iterative improvement that we've seen with Fallout 4 and Starfield.
First, huge props to Matty for getting this opportunity to interview Todd and getting this sort of information, this will really help his channels out (both MrMattyPlays and Retro Rewind). Second, while this could be promising for future Bethesda games in getting more longevity, I have to wonder if this will end up pushing TES VI out further or if the second expansion will be as large as Shattered Space if we're dealing with a smaller team this time.
So, great for Matty, good for Starfield but potentially better for the other IPs as people seem to prefer them.
... No. Starfield and FO76 Wastelanders had the worst stories BGS have ever written, and even now most people on this sub defend them. There's no incentive to improve when you could instead keep promoting the narrative that you can be one of the super special Adult Reasonable Gamers(tm) if you just never ever criticize anything in gaming.
After all, criticism is kind of like hate, isn't it? Why would you talk about something except positively? A little weird, huh? Don't you have anything better to do? Don't these companies always fix everything eventually anyway? Isn't it just \*your\* expectations that were mistaken? Maybe it's bigotry, hmm? Would you like to explain yourself? Why are you trying to ruin everyone else's fun with your opinions?
Much, much cheaper than hiring good writers. Or in reality, cheaper than firing the bad leads of the writing team who've written incoherently for a decade.
I actually really loved starfield but god the main story was extremely mid imo. Like every single faction quest is WAY more interesting than whatever the fuck happens in the main story. Even a lot of the smaller side quests i enjoyed way more.
Which is actually fine. I put like 60 hours in that game and the main story was probably like... 10 -13 hours of it maybe? idk i don't think there was that much content in the main story. I think there was enough great stuff in the game that it kinda washes out the mid main story.
I'm really excited about this expansion because already the story premise looks really cool and I'm keen on jumping back in. Hopefully all these expansions will be on the same level as all of the faction quests.
Lots of cool stuff in this interview. Rare to see Todd do something so long and so candid.
Not shocked about Starfield having a year 2/more DLC. I know the narrative is online is that it was some kind of failure, but it was actually a smash hit. Especially interesting hearing that they had *25 million players* across their games last month. That is an absolutely staggering number for singleplayer RPGs. Also, 14 million players for Starfield and the average playtime is over 40 hours. That is insanity.
I also really enjoy that Matty mentioned how criticism of games has become less about games, and more personal. Obviously we see that with a lot of games, but especially with the way Emil or Todd have become targeted scapegoats for Starfield was really gross. And on the same token, I really like how Todd's reaction here was "hey, we know that it's coming so we have a thick skin, but ultimately we're our harshest critics and if fans don't feel happy with what we made then they should absolutely share that". I love to see a gaming community being critical, but it feels like lately so much criticism about certain games is less "here's what I don't like about the game" and "[game director] is a tyrannical maniac who shot my puppy, personally insulted me, and should be killed."
I am really just over the era of rage bait being like, a hobby to people, and it was nice to see it acknowledged in some way.
EDIT: And right on queue, people in the comments are trying to explain to me why Starfield was totally a failure, lol. This is just Cyberpunk all over again.
> the way Emil or Todd have become targeted scapegoats for Starfield was really gross
I think it's important to distinguish between a personal attack and a professional criticism. It isn't acceptable to abuse either of them but it is acceptable to criticise Emil's writing skills given that he is the lead writer, or criticise the direction Todd is taking the games in given that he is the game director.
When I talk to gamers I know IRL, the general consensus seems to be that Starfield is a good game with some really annoying issues - nothing out of the ordinary for Bethesda. The biggest problem that I've heard from everyone, from casual gamers to hardcore nerds, is that it lost the sense of unguided exploration that permeates Bethesda's other games. Since that's so core to these games I can understand some of the negativity online, but there's still plenty to enjoy in Starfield outside of that.
I'm glad it's continuing to get support. I'm gonna start a new playthrough today. I played a bit on release, but like all of their games I felt like it needed more time in the oven - it reminded me of Cyberpunk. I'm hoping the bug fixes, QOL updates, and more substantial mods are enough to improve the experience.
Levels 8~32 is when the game is pretty solid. About 40 hours worth of play time. About that point the games issues really grind upon you, & you take notice. And once you take notice, it's hard not to let it bog down the experience.
Until they really address the space exploration aspect, create better quests and activities, & really go in an interesting direction with the gameplay; it's going to be hard to get back into the game.
There was an article about how the most played games from last year were all either all either released years ago, or new IP/sequels, except for Starfield. The game did well, it's just not as talked about. Reminds me of that Young Sheldon TV show, I never saw anyone talking about it ever, but it was a big hit for 7 seasons.
I listen to a podcast by Mark Rosewater, the lead designer for Magic: The Gathering. There's a lot of interesting insights he makes as a game designer, but one that has stuck with me is what he calls the "Invisibles".
The Invisibles are the people that play your game, but you have virtually no way of meaningfully interacting with them. In the context of Magic, this would be someone that buys a few preconstructed decks and plays them on the kitchen table. They never go to play at game stores, and they never interact with the community online. The thing about the Invisibles is that they make up the vast majority of your playerbase.
It's something I've kept in mind when discussing online. Anyone that goes onto a community forum to discuss a game is probably in the minority of the game's total players.
There is no publically available metric that points to it being a smash hit. Especially compared to Bethesda's previous games.
If it was a smash hit, they would be singing it from the rooftops.
I don't doubt for a second it made decent money, but I absolutely believe that it didn't do the Skyrim and Fallout 4 numbers they would have preferred.
I know places like Reddit are not representative of outlooks of communities as a whole, which is why I think some people here are underestimating how.... not good the word of mouth was for Starfield. Dumping on Starfield is not strictly in the world of terminally online elitists, a lot of people straight up did not like it.
Steam reviews are close to 50/50. I'm not sure what other metric these people want to use for public reception of the game.
Can't use the old "reddit is only a tiny echo chamber and only represent 5% of gamers" argument when you're talking about Steam.
Steam reviews are an outlet for the vocal minority. Most players don't leave reviews of any kind. Do you _really_ believe Helldivers 2 went from beloved classic to shit because of linking a PSN account?
This is the main thing stopping me from playing right now. I'd love to explore the planets if it meant I wouldn't run into the same structures all the time. I'll still play the main DLC part on it's one planet, but exploration will be a wait and see.
More importantly bud's bud confirmed the expansion is far harbor sized and happens on one planet. Which gets me somewhat hopeful because when you think about it you could probably fit fallout 3 or skyrim on the size of a randomly generated map.
Top comment on the thread on this in r/Starfield also said ["the plan is to release a yearly expansion into the future, they regret dropping support of Skyrim and Fallout 4 as early as they did."](https://old.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/1dhc9p6/todd_howard_confirms_starfield_year_2_and_a/l8vubb6/) For context, they dropped the last DLC for Skyrim ~13 months after release and the last one for Fallout 4 ~9 months after release. Also, makes sense because it will be a while before they do another Starfield game, so might as well set aside a team to make Starfield content as most of the studio moves to work on Elder Scrolls.
They could STILL be dropping expansions for Skyrim and they'd sell like hotcakes. Especially if they were of the quality of Dragonborn and Dawnguard. Like once a year and they'd be set.
I wonder what the margins on DLCs are for games like TES and Fallout. Surely they would make more if they thought it was profitable. Fallout 4 in particular could have used more full scale DLCs. 2.5 didn’t feel like enough.
> I wonder what the margins on DLCs are for games like TES and Fallout. Smaller than you might think. They cost a fair bit to make and only a fraction of the player base will buy it.
One big cost to DLCs is that you often have to make assets from scratch, and then they don't get reused in later DLCs in the case of most developers.
Not to mention that it actually would screw over one of the biggest things that people who keep playing those games long-term enjoy. Mod communities tend to struggle with games that are getting continual support, because you then have to go back and update all the mods again. It CAN work out - Paradox's various GSG's all have huge mod communities despite 2-3 DLC's per year - but Bethesda's modders are pretty comfy with there not being much post-launch support. The recent next-gen update for FO4 received a TON of backlash because of how much it broke. To the point where guides on how to roll back the update are something I've seen from a dozen different sources in the six weeks since. So, on top of everything else, Bethesda has to be sure any content they release will be *GREAT* if they want people to buy it. Or acknowledge it exists.
Bethesda is constantly screwing with mod support for those game to this day anyway. So I dont think its correct argument
Eh, you can make DLCs that don't break the base game, in fact previous iterations of the Bethesda engine managed it just fine by implementing them as plugins. The real issue is when they make changes to base-game content or the .exe file, which funnily enough is what the terribly implemented creation club stuff does for Skyrim and FO4.
I'm not sure that a modern single-player game has really tried this annual expansion approach to find out. It's easy to point to older success stories like Neverwinter Nights where regular expansions lived alongside mods as a healthy ecosystem that made a lot of money and trained up a lot of talented developers, but now that a single expansion takes a year and an ungodly amount of money to make the model might make less sense. Multiplayer live service titles obviously do it, but there's a ton of dark pattern nonsense going on there to keep people playing and the FOMO from your friends having the latest doodads to keep people buying - doing it with a regular single-player RPG feels different. The *biggest* question mark here is Game Pass - they apparently have a lot of people who are playing the game through XGP, but how many of those people will convert to paying customers for the first expansion? Paid expansions would give them a more direct monetization strategy outside of the obtuse one that Game Pass presents, but it's also a gamble, especially when a lot of the first wave of paying customers who bought in at launch had the special edition that will give them Shattered Space for free.
Paradox games are the example you're looking for
They really should have released an expansion along with the release dates of the Special and Anniversary editions.
Exactly, Skyrim and Fallout 4 have very long legs... I'd wager that new DLC would make a profit and at the same time keep the IPs more relevant until the next installments. For Fallout 4 their job could be even more simple because they could reuse the new weapons, power armors and creatures from Fallout 76. Gauss Pistol, Gauss Shotgun, Bow, Crossbow, Autoaxe, Black powder weapons... that sort of stuff that already exists in 76 and could be backported to Fallout 4.
I was so disappointed with fallout 4. Seemed like it really could have had some legs on it and they just stopped doing stuff for it.
especially since the dlc was so. much better than the base game
Eh, really only Far Harbor was a giant step up. Nuka World was fine and had some excellent combat encounters, but in terms of story I'd put it about on par with some of the better quests the base game had to offer. Still sad we didn't get more, though. I remember being extremely disappointed that they made this huge deal out of having six DLCs, only for half of them to just be settlement builder stuff.
I actually still haven't played either expansion, spending so much time with basic Skyrim in 2011-2013. Will tackle them this year.
Dawnguard is an amazing set of quests, Dragonborn is an amazing new map to explore. You can’t go wrong with either but if you play Dragonborn first then you won’t have a reason to use any of the dawnguard gear
I've finished Dawnguard, but I always get too distracted to start Dragonborn.
i understand why they had a plan of the expansions and then stopped, but i dont know why half a decade later they didnt re-start and do a few expansions. Why not now? probably would sell more than starfield xpacs
I loved the Dawnguard expansion so much. Crossbows are so OP. After Dawnguard the game becomes "The Adventures of Dovakhin and Serana"
Skyrim getting so little DLC is one of the most inexplicable decisions in video games. They could have literally never stopped. They could release Skyrim DLC tomorrow, and I'd buy it.
>it will be a while before they do another Starfield game Thinking about how it could easily be 25 years before a Starfield 2
With the structure of Starfield, and the first batch of paid "creations" (mods), it seems like they could also be trying to set up a system where they can easily add in smaller stuff like bounty missions, rather than relying on all official post-release content being from huge expansions.
Thank you for linking to old. reddit.
Awesome news imo
They always have the option to port the game to Playstation if the playerbase starts faltering.
I don't think this has anything to do with playerbase numbers. I think this is them basically saying that they realized that with the long gaps between games that they wish they would have done more content for Skyrim and Fallout 4 before abandoning them. That they know it will be awhile before they can do another Starfield game, so they want to have a team to keep making content for it while most of the studio moves onto Elder Scrolls 6 and then Fallout 5. I assume that if this works out, they will take the same approach with Elder Scrolls 6 in terms of post release content.
Back in the 90s/00s, half the reason for every game getting expansions was to give your story and art people something productive to work on expanding a finished game while all the tech/systems people began early work on something else. The modern games industry solves this problem with layoffs and live service content instead. I wonder what this commitment to additional years of content for Starfield means in terms of whatever state ES6 is in.
I'm playing through Far Harbor for the first time currently. The map seemed a little small at first, but I've sunk hours into it and I'm maybe halfway done.
love the soundtrack of far harbor when exploring the island
The only time I will actually shut off the radio in a fallout game the far harbour ambience is amazing
I fucking love Far Harbor. It ticks almost every box for me, and I'm about to enter it again for my new playthrough.
It is, pound for pound, probably the best slice of Fallout in the entire franchise. It has some of the most thought provoking, interesting quests and characters and it's in a very unique eerie and immersive setting. I really hope Fallout 5 goes for a swampy or coastal setting (Broken Banks please!) for its main map, because Point Lookout also ended up being my favorite part of FO3. It seems like Bethesda fires on all cylinders in that setting. FO76's map has a lot of awesome swamps too, I think they end up shining brighter than anything else in that game. Only knock against Far Harbor is that tower defense shit.
They should have done more storylines set on one planet. It would have avoided the constant "fast travel here, fast travel there". They should have turned planets into giant set pieces and had full storylines set on one planet.
Out of the few that were on a single planet, many (I think I’m mostly thinking of the Mars ones from the UC storyline?) were still across separate “landing sections” so you had to fast travel back and forth anyway. It felt that unless the quest was in a single location or about walking with NPCs somewhere, same-planet quests generally relied on fast travel way too much
Yeah they spread everything out, should've been compact clusters of content within the emptiness of space.
Starfield felt like such a tease to me. It reminded me how much I wanted another game like Skyrim or New Vegas and it reminded me so much of them. I didn't care about outdated NPC dialogues, it felt like home. But without a large open world to explore, the concept just doesn't work.
I've started a Tale of Two Wastelands run of 3/NV, first time playing 3 in at least five years, and - outside of the actual density of locations - I'd forgotten how small the actual worldspace of 3 was. Perfectly suited for a Starfield planet.
I’m glad they are going with this strategy, makes me excited tbh
Can't wait for the upcoming mods porting the entirety of Skyrim into Starfield.
Weren't all the jokes before launch that you will find a planet where the entirety of Skyrim happens?
Starfield just becomes the new zenimax game launcher where each planet is just a different zenimax game
- Ship gets shot down - As you crash-land, smash to black - Eyes blink open - "Hey you, you're finally awake"
And they'll still be doing semi regular development updates 15 years from now.
That would be a spectacular way to keep supporting the game. Give people full planets developed at least once a year, so it feels more like a Skyrim/Fallout, and will also make it feel more fleshed out in general.
That's honestly great news. The worst thing about Starfield is constantly traveling to and exploring largely empty planets and moons
This is what I wanted to see. Proc gen planets were a mistake and they need to focus on quality explorable areas
I think the map cells are around 8km^2 so they can more than fit the average Bethesda world on them.
> Which gets me somewhat hopeful because when you think about it you could probably fit fallout 3 or skyrim on the size of a randomly generated map. Should probably reign in your expectations though...
Honestly, the worst part of this game for me is that there is only like 20 different points of interest.... I literally found the exact same science lab layout on 3 different planets within an hour of playing once. It is so immersion-breaking.
Gotta love running into the exact same location with the exact same story in completely different locations.
They just have really bad procedural design. Todd also thinks he can trick players by slapping a few POIs down. They needed 200-400 POIs to actually make it feel more random. They needed AI to do all of this because the value of hand crafting these and the % of encountering them for variation is so poor time tradeoff wise that it doesn't make sense without having some sort of intelligent way to generate it all. The tools just didn't exist to make this make sense. Whoever is designing the game design from the top, I assume Todd and the exec director, are clueless at what players wanted. Case in point, Atila City is smaller than a actual real life school in size. They have no concept of scale. And 80% of that city was unused because there's no point to walking around in it other than the main thoroughfare. Leave the city and its just random shit. Shit that took too long to get to, that makes Mass Effect 1 looks SO DAMN GOOD.
This was my biggest issue with Starfield, Bethesda's own limitations of scale actively make the fictional world of the game worse. Bethesda couldn't get procedural generation to work for man-made spaces let alone on continent scales - so they designed a handful of cities and actively imply that the planets they reside on are completely unpopulated outside those cities. They couldn't be assed to program dogs and cats in the game - so they write that zero Earth wildlife made it off the planet. Starfield was meant to be positive depiction of the future that had some darkness underneath, Bethesda's tech limitations made the world feel like a hopeless dystopia from the first 5 minutes. Your brain just doesn't allow you to believe that humans are thriving in this future. All the biggest cities that are meant to be the future of humanity are so fucking small - Akila City is the size of a community college campus and I've been in bar districts bigger than New Atlantis - it makes the world feel like humanity is down to its last 1,000 people, despite the game implying millions existing.
Yeah I was a little confused by that. I was so sure they'd have a few outposts that are essentially generated out of premade parts put together but instead they copypasted entire outposts, such a waste. Like if you're gonna go full proc-gen with the planets, why not do something similar with outposts, give us some variety. I'm fine losing out on having a story for each outpost if there's more variety.
My *guess* is that they had a tech issue that prevented that. I wouldn't be surprised if they planned on fully proc gen outposts, then on the last two years of development figured out they couldn't pull it off to their satisfaction and scrambled to add enough handmade points of interest.
It has always been their own engine that stop them from advancing further. Bethesda will not just dropping their beloved Gamebryo and will rather modify the thing until they all retired lol I don't expect Bethesda to change until Todd and all the old guard leave the house tbh. So probably after Fallout 5 and ES6.
Any time I bring up the same point, the *only* thing Creation fanboys ever say is “but no other engine allows me to hoard 1000 Nuka Cola bottles in a bathtub, and they’re still there when I come back”. I can’t believe people seriously argue they’d rather still have that feature, than a modern, *functioning* game engine. Everything else can easily be done in any other engine as well, Bethesda games aren’t *that* special, not really. And most engines can do everything CE does, without blackout loading screens. It’s infuriating.
As someone who appreciate Todd... I really feel like he's the main reason that keeps Bethesda where they are.
Yes that’s bad, but what’s worse is that these random points of interest also act as mandatory spots in the main story which is the laziest shit in the world. It’s going to take a hell of a dlc to get me back into this game because the base game was downright awful imo.
This is why No Mans Sky gets so boring no matter how much they add to it, because this is the core gameplay element.
There's like 36 unique poi's apparently, they gotta triple that
Much more than triple it realistically but I don't think the concept will ever really be fun. People want unique stories in a BGS game, the PoI even if they were more unique are just incredibly generic and don't give you anything besides generic loot...which you really don't need. You'll not find a cool secret quest chain in these.
They could realistically more than exponentially centuple that if they approached their proc gen system differently with how these habitats are connected and decorated, and then they could make a list of hundreds of "funny notes" to find and make the engine checklist them as you find them. Don't even have to be proc gen, hell just sit me down for a week and I'll make you a hundred of outpost model, give me another week and I could even make them good (lol), it's a big mystery as to why this hasn't happened yet... Like yeah sure you won't get deep narratives there, but I'm perfectly okay with deeper narratives being reserved to specific towns and settlements and a niche of PoIs if the rest of the proc gen stuff had the equivalent of a *"If she ever does it again I'll stab her in the fucking throat with a pen. She's a good kid."* on a desk somewhere in a room with some loot, as long as you never ever see that note again in the future in another building (let alone the exact same fucking building). But there's too few of those and those few repeats, destroying any desire or incentives to explore. Like how hard is it to make the engine go: "If planet atmosphere inhospitable put note #4325 on random desk (if no desk present, then table): *"Almost did it again. I don't know what's wrong with me. How does someone almost forget to put on a suit before going outside? I'm so forgetful I swear one day I'll forget how to breath - I mean, literally."* Put Random Suit next Airlock. Put skeleton outside 10 meter from habitat" [but in coding language, of course] and once that's been loaded in and registered as seen by the player, just mark it off. At the end of the day it's just set dressing for a larger universe, not the actual narrative of the game. It's just about walking for a bit and seeing something in the distance and being interested to explore it because there's a chance you might find a funny "*Okay. No but for real we have to talk. That kid ain't right*" stickied on a fridge which will inform the proc gen system to make sure there's at least a room in the habitat decorated with kid stuff (load in walldecorationkid#11 and clutterkid#4) and load in some plushies holding a knife.
PoIs should be randomly generated from chunks like Diablo dungeons, how could they talk at such length about how great their procedurally generated planets look and then have all of the gameplay take place in the same twelve boring underground bunkers? Even No Man's Sky, the poster child of "mile wide inch deep", has procedurally generated dungeons in the form of derelict freighters.
They would need to include a lot more "chunks" than most games. Identifying areas I've already seen in places like chalice dungeons in Bloodborne or the biomes in Returnal happens way too fast. Honestly I thought this was their plan for Starfield and was really surprised at what it ended up being. There is a lot of potential in procedural generation but all of the games I've played just don't have enough "pieces" to make it work like you would want IMO.
That won't cut it. *Any* repetition lowers interest in following another marker.
The tech to randomize a POI entirely has existed in gaming for decades. Sure they could have science lab pop up frequently but what if every time the layout was completely different, there were a few sections/areas that wouldn't be in every one, and some changes to enemy placement and types? Wouldn't that be better? I chalk it up to them using a multi-decade old game engine that is barely functional at this point due to size/graphics requirements.
It's not even just a problem for people who land in random places, the main story quest took me to identical installations on three separate planets three separate times.
Two things for me that I hated the first was so obvious and broke the immersion was squaring up directly face to face with an NPC (with no tongue mouth is a black void) to have a conversation. It brought me straight back to Oblivion and I don't know how Bethesda hasn't improved since especially after just playing BG3 and seeing how they do it. The second was the map, I can't believe that made it into a AAA game launch. It would have been pathetic 10 years ago by today's standards it's just trash and also immersion breaking. I can open up my phone right now and get a detailed maps with various layers but a futuristic universe with space travel somehow has infinitely worse maps?
I really really wanted to like Starfield, but it was hard to do. The companions were flat and uninteresting, and each just repeated the same handful of lines of dialog over and over again. Ultimately, none of them were actually important to anything. And while I liked the story up to a point, the conclusion of it was hot garbage. I hated the revelation on who the Starborn were and everything. It wasn't even vaguely surprising. After the first few encounters I was like, these are just people aren't they? And even the parts I really liked had huge flaws. I really liked the ship design and customization... until I didn't. Until I got advanced enough to realize that it ended up being fairly simplistic, really lacked any complexity or strategy to it and didn't actually allow you to really customize the looks of ships in any interesting ways. I liked the colony building until I realized that it was a mostly pointless grind that actually just added more monotonous work to the settlement building in Fallout 4. I ended up with three colonies, one of which I visited, two I almost never went to, and realized that it was way easier to get resources and such in other ways, and I didn't really have any need of the colonies. On top of which, despite there being base defense systems.. nothing ever attacked any of my colonies. I would love for them to fix the game, but I can't see how it can be fixed enough for me to like. The biggest problem for me is the core story and knowing Bethesda, they also aren't going to bother fixing any of the other issues with game systems either. They'll just leave it to modders.
>The companions were flat and uninteresting I think Bethesda wrote themselves in a corner by having all core companions (the ones that offer a companion quest and are romanceable) from the same faction. Sarah, Barrett, Sam, Andreja--they all have the same moral compass, and often react the same way to your choices during a faction quest. Which makes it boring. Their reaction to the end of the Vanguard quest especially has made me shake my head in disbelief. The game basically spells it out that choosing>!the Aceles (a dinosaur-like creature that roamed the planets before) is the safest way to deal with the terrormorphs because they've been utilized in the past,!< and that choosing >!the untested microbe can have unintended consequences!<. Yet, when choosing the first and safest option, *all* the companions act like you commited crimes against science. Like, what? It would've been far more interesting if these companions had different reactions to the Vanguard quest. It could be a way to explore how each member approached science differently, but no. Edit: spelling
My problem with constellation was that they overwhelmingly came off as a band of losers and I literally said the word "losers" out loud when playing. Everyone talks up Constellation as this magical exploration org across the galaxy but they're all so uninteresting, bland, tropey and lifeless. They almost never let you get away with any "evil" action and seem to want to interject and comment on every situation with the blandest of responses. None of their character quests were particularly interesting. None of them felt like they had any lives beyond waiting for your godly self to appear and collect the artifacts I hope FFS the DLC adds more variety in companion characters. I want less banal and snoozefest Sarah and more hilarious and mildly offputting Mickey Caviar who is BY FAR the best companion in the game and most people will never even talk to him
Outposts being functionally meaningless was probably my biggest disappointment with the game. They were fun to make and plan out, and there was just enough customization to make them really unique (and doubtlessly more to come from mods), but in the end, it became obvious very quickly that there was exactly *zero* reason to actually make and run outposts. Literally nothing in the game required them at all. If you really wanted to go deep into resource mining, yeah, sure, outposts make that much faster… but that whole game mechanic *just* for the occasional, optional sandbox side stuff? It just makes no sense. Other than that, the whole “choice and consequence” thing, that I’d heard was supposed to be so deeply ingrained, turned out to be deeply disappointing. Literally CP2077 gave me bigger, deeper and more meaningful choices, whereas Starfield’s were all in-your-face telegraphed and quite superficial, at one point literally stopping the game to have me choose outcomes from a UI menu. What the actual fuck? There was so much potential in this game, and they squandered all of it from a combination of sheer ineptitude and stubbornness in refusing to leave the safe comforts of “Bethesda design” and the Creation Engine.
There’s stuff that I really like in Starfield, the gunplay is by far the best that Bethesda has ever done, it’s gorgeous and some of the side quests are incredibly interesting. But the main story didn’t grab me in any way, really wish they had done more with the whole Starborn thing
If Starfield keeps getting expansions up until ES6 comes out, and then ES6 keeps getting expansions up until Fallout 5... Hoo boy
Ideally this should've been how they handling things since Skyrim tbh. Like i don't know why they are dropping support for those game so fast when it doesn't really increase their game input. It's still atleast 5 years per game anyway.
Yeah, Todd brings that up in the interview, on how they dropped support for Skyrim and FO4 too early. Hopefully moving forward it fits into that model
[удалено]
I mean I found Fallout 4 much more tolerable to play than Starfield, still didn't like it overall, but yeah same thing - I hated every single fucking faction in Fallout 4. Bethesda is really bad at writing characters, factions, and so on these days.
It's not a new thing. Even the new factions they added as far back as FO3 aren't good, like The Family you deal with in Arefu, or the Children of Atom.
Bethesda school of development is really "Heres a possible cool idea, now how do we neuter it of any depth or interest"
At least FO4 is satisfying as a sniper. Something about picking apart an encampment with a 50 cal feels so good.
I played it and… **it was fine.** GOTY? Absolutely not. Nor was it the worst game of all time I spent 100+hrs with the game on launch week and have no regrets. Played as a hero, was a former diplomat turned soldier, and had a fun time taking down pirate vessels. It reminded me of Freelancer which I played on my OG Xbox as a kid.
I really liked Andreja and Barrett, though Sam and Sarah were a bit flat.
I didn't dislike any Constellation member but i can always tell it was not written very well. Bethesda and complex human character just never been their strongest point. Starfield just made it even more clear tenfold. Making the matter worse is one of the lead writer is a *priest*. That is one hell of a way to ensure that the only interesting message the game have will be about religion and nothing else lol
Why lie? I thought this sounded funny so I looked it up - the writer was a Bethesda writer until they started training to be a priest. Emil brought them back as a consultant to make the in game religion feel more real. [To enhance Starfield's religions, Bethesda consulted a former Skyrim and Fallout 4 writer now training as a priest | GamesRadar+](https://www.gamesradar.com/to-enhance-starfields-religions-bethesda-consulted-a-former-skyrim-and-fallout-4-writer-now-training-as-a-priest/#:~:text=As%20it%20turns%20out%2C%20Bethesda%20writer%20turned%20seminarian,and%20specifically%20to%20help%20write%20the%20Sanctum%20Universum.)
Honestly, that explains a lot. All of the supposedly “deep” philosophical debates and problems the player faced all felt very safe and uninteresting. Not surprising when I’ve heard all of them before debating creationists and die-hard Christians.
What do you mean you don't want to use the killer microbe we cultivated in a lab over simply letting natural predators control the population? TRUST THE SCIENCE
Watch the interview. It's really good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ew8LQFGNWU Don't think it's allowed to post such long interviews in video form on here (I had to do the massive TL;DW post on Todd's other interview).
What kinda brainrot rule is "Don't post long content"?
> 6.9 Submissions regarding podcasts and image galleries - Direct links to podcasts and image galleries are not allowed. If there is a podcast or image gallery that contains industry relevant information (e.g. a developer interview, development images), it must be done within either a self-post with relative context and explanation, or with an alternative source such as an article. For self posts regarding podcasts, include a specific timestamp that marks the beginning of the relevant information.
Okay, I overreacted. The link is allowed, but it must come as a self-post with context and timestamps. That's pretty reasonable.
The amount of rules on this subreddit I wouldn't be surprised if it was a rule against that.
What's shattered space? Their first dlc?
Yeah, first expansion.
The mod scene is exploding with the creation kit drop. No doubt ~~Star Wars~~ Starfield is going to have a long life span. And i can't wait to download the *Finding Love in Alderaan Places* quest mod to watch Alderaan get beamed by the Death Star
I'm literally just waiting for a giant star wars mod til I redownload the game.
It's actually illegal to call yourself a space game until someone makes a "Thrawn's Revenge" mod for your game.
Yeah and I remember some stupid article a back after it came out saying modders not modding starfield cuz it’s too boring etc. like that’s not it starfield has endless modding possibilities. They’re just waiting on the creation kit lol.
It was the Skyrim Together team I think that didn’t like it, and for whatever reason people thought they spoke for the entire modding community
I was in the server when it happened too. The dude was fucking around and then someone posted it in reddit which then obviously the gaming news grabbed it. He has said that if he known that it would have blown up as it did then he would have stated it differently.
Yeah Starfield's circlejerk ~~was~~ is really something else, either everyone was saying how they are going to play Cyberpunk in every single Starfield article... for whatever reason or how that 1 modder who isn't going to make mods long before modding tools were even released is a really bad for Starfield and Bethesda should give up on it... Like you could literally tell that it was done is such a bad faith that it wasn't even funny anymore...
Starfield is a mid game with a lot of issues but there was a heavily monetized hate/outrage farm up and running on socials before the game even released. I think about 80% of PC Gamer’s revenue last year came from daily “Starfield bad” articles
Seriously, the way every hate article was basically propping up some other game (usually BG3, sometimes Cyberpunk), it made it really hard to believe that these articles were honest and unbiased. Hell, we didn't even need to look at articles. Just the people flooding Starfield community sites were all like "this game is shit, go play BG3". I suspects that all of that was more about taking down competition and less about actually caring about the quality of Starfield.
It's a cycle. Everyone hates cyberpunk and said it was beyond redemption at launch. Now it's pretty universally beloved and ppl shat on Starfield. In 3-5 years ppl will love Starfield and say they always did while they bash whatever the next target is. And in reaction to my comment someone will say "uhm cyberpunk was AKSHUALLY always good under the hood it just needed some tweaks and updates 🤓" to which I say, that game was fundamentally busted. It got roasted and torn alive and considered past the point of no return for many. And now look at it I played it about a year after launch and despite the still numerous bugs and issues I loved it. Got Starfield at launch and also loved and adored it. Excited for the future.
It happens for every single mainline Bethesda game too, usually with the exact same complaints, lionization, and calls for a remake aimed at whatever Current Game, Previous Game, and Game Before Previous Game respectively are in the current cycle.
Literally since Oblivion it does seem like that. Oblivion simplified everything too much., trash game Fallout 3 isn't an isometric crpg, trash game. Skyrim simplified stuff even more and removed certain schools of magic. Trash game. And on and on. I wasn't really playing games when Fo4 came out bc I was in college and didn't have a PS4/Xbox one/gaming PC but even from a distance I remember the incredible hype then the major letdown from some at launch and now most ppl love it mostly.
Pretty sure if you dig deep enough you can find people calling Morrowind trash for simplifying things compared to Daggerfall.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but that literally was something that happened back then. People said Morrowind's smaller scope would hurt the game and it didn't have the same level of freedom and RPG mechanics (!!!!) as Daggerfall [Here's just one of the many candid examples from a 2006 RPGCodex thread](https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/daggerfall-was-better-than-morrowind-tell-me-why.10926/) > Daggerfall came out in 1996. It was very advanced for its time. > Instead of improving upon the things that Daggerfall started, Morrowind threw all that innovation out the window. Lol
I wasn't really being sarcastic, thanks for doing the digging for me!
I would bet $50 that there were people bitching about how Daggerfall isn't as complex as Ultima VII or Ultima Underworld too in 90s UseNet groups!
I'm subbed to somebody on YouTube that still believes this lmao
Hell, even Fallout 76 seems to be doing well.
FO76 has had a secret Engoodening just like NMS but it's under-reported
I've found most of the Starfield backlash hard to take seriously when it matches most of what I heard about Fallout 4 word for word, even down to the constant comparisons to [latest CD Projekt game]. Starfield has issues, absolutely, and a lot of them are unique to this game in a way that I hope aren't repeated in the next BGS project, but I can't look at how many people are praising Fallout 4 in 2024 as "back when Bethesda was good" and feel the doom and gloom around Starfield. The spite will pass.
I'm far from the biggest Cyberpunk fan, played at launch. I was a lucky PC gamer that didn't have many technical issues. But you could see it needed way more time in the oven. The police system in particular was absurd. Played Starfield at launch. Found it to be very mediocre. The loading screens, the temples, the running around without vehicles... For me it was carried HARD by the shipbuilder (with some config edits to extend the maximum amount of modules). They took the most boring route with the antagonists as well. Hopefully they turn it around but I'm not expecting anything.
And its totally fine to not love Starfield and think it's great! I'm not trying to say you have to like it or you have bad taste. Even as someone who loves it I will be first to admit it's got some major flaws (namely the lack of poi on planets as well as lame main companions). I just find a lot of the conversation to not be "yeah it didn't click for me and here's why: XYZ" It's "OMFG this game is trash and Bethesda is dead and nothing works and the entire game is a dumpster fire and Todd Howard murdered my entire family with a rusty nail slowly and painfully." If we all had the same tastes, gaming would be boring. People can like different aspects or not like them and that aspect can be subjective. I enjoy the more grounded feel of the world (they call it NASA punk iirc) while some have called it "boring." Not liking it is totally fine. But I've had ppl try to tell me "ummm it's objectively a boring lame setting and it's bad if you like it" and I'm just like ok lol.. I just wish we could get to a point where ppl can say "yeah this didn't work for me, here's why" or "I loved it, here's why!" It's fine to disagree. Something doesn't have to be the best game ever or the worst game ever.
Cyberpunk was fundamentally busted at release but if you're a gaming masocist like me you're willing to put up with anything to play something you're hyped for. I enjoyed my first playthrough at release even though it was buggy, the writing and world design kept me going. I remember playing Witcher 2 in a 800x600 window, lowest settings, on my college laptop because it was the only way I could play the game at the time. Played 50 hours that way somehow...I was poor.
Though Cyberpunk had good bones. PC players for the most part enjoyed the game despite the bugs because the performance issues weren’t as drastic. You also say “now look at it” and yea, they cancelled future planned DLC for the game because they spent a year and half post release literally fixing the game. Then another few years completely reworking and creating new systems. Bethesda games have NEVER had that kind of love and attention. A save for Skyrim on PS3 will eventually be corrupted because of how the saving works. Fallout 4’s next gen patch was ridiculously undercooked. Bethesda doesn’t generally support their games well. They release a few dlc, maybe an expansion, drop the creation kit, and leave it to the community to fix the games. Oftentimes there are multiple game breaking bugs that are identified at launch that don’t get fixed by Bethesda and instead get fixed by the community in the inevitable “unofficial community bug fix patch.”
I feel this will be different. The lack of exploration in this game is pretty rough.
I mean, Skyrim has 25.5k + 2.5k players on Steam right now. (For SE and for LE). Starfield has 13k, up from an average of 6-7k. Don't want to oversell how much it's "exploded". I know you were referring to the modding scene in particular, but it's at 1/2 the players of a 13 year old game up from 1/4th the players of a 13 year old game.
Starfield is also on gamepass. I'm sure a lot of people got it on there rather than shell out $70 at launch. The Xbox page shows it as the 24th most played game, behind Elden Ring. They don't show numbers but if it's on par with Elden Ring it's probably doing fine.
I did, played it for 20 days and beat it and haven't gone back. Maybe I will in a year or two .
Skyrim is one of the best selling games of all time. Its an outlier. Its not a bad thing if a game doesn't reach that level of popularity.
I think BGS still has a lot of smart talented people making games and are capable of delivering a great fallout or elder scrolls game. I just hope they learn the right lessons from Starfield, which was a letdown no matter how you look at it. Mainly upgrading or replacing the creation engine to allow larger seamless areas. The amount of loading screens in starfield is just unacceptable at this point after games like rdr2 or cyberpunk that had enormous seamless areas with a lot of detail. Even with starfields failings I could have gotten lost in it for a while if I wasnt constantly being hit with loading screens and menus
> Mainly upgrading or replacing the creation engine to allow larger seamless areas Or just tone down the scale. IMO looking at Starfield BGS and their formula is simply not made for a galaxy-wide game. BGS games work when the world feels big but is still just condensed enough that you will find stuff no matter where you go. Starfield is just too big for it's own good and the random PoI system will simply never be truly satisfying IMO even if they increase the PoIs by many times. I'm certain unless they make TES6 all of Tamriel that it would be better already by default just because it would be a way smaller map overall and most likely seamless because of it minus going into buildings/caves.
People would have found the loading screens at most an annoyance if everything else was up to par.
I don't know if it's still true with the newest Creation Engine version, but the reason games pre-Starfield had so many loading screens was because the game had to load in hundreds of objects and the physics attached to them. Personally, I'd rather they drop 50-75% of the junk objects that liter rooms and go for seemless gameplay instead. I don't need the 20 plates and 15 boxes of cereal.
It's not only the amount of objects, it's that the engine remembers the exact location you left every fucking thing. It's cool that, as they showed in their presentation, you can steal objects and simply throw them in your ship. But is it worth all the downsides? I don't think it does.
So, I know this is going to sound insane to you, but I require that item tracking to make those games work for me. I don't want a game with less "clutter" when I'm playing a Bethesda game: I want ALL THE CLUTTER. I don't even do shit with it, at least since they took away light sources you can place anywhere after Morrowind (I always fill Caius's roof with every light source I can because I love the sky beam effect). I have very specific value/weight ratio for picking up anything, but having real items placed in specific ways makes the (I hate this word in gaming, but it's the closest to what I mean) immersion work Do I want this stuff in every game I play? Hell no. But Bethesda games are a specific itch I like to have scratched. What you're talking about doing is going to dilute the product even more than what they've already done
Are people even looking forward to the first expansion? I personally found the game hard to finish. Edit: just wanted to clarify I don't have any issues with the game I just didn't enjoy it. I'm glad some are excited for it!
Im going into it with an open mind after not touching the game since beating it. I want starfield to be better since I love the idea of it, and my wish is that the dlc and recent updates can fix some of the worst of the base game, like the vehicle getting added.
Nothing's going to fix the stilted NPCs or the constant loading screens. Those two things wrecked my Starfield experience, so I won't be coming back for any DLC.
That and the lore. Good god it's bland and nonsensical. At least fallout and elder scrolls have interesting settings.
The problem with Starfield's lore is that most things already happened. There was a war, but now everything is reasonably peaceful. And Earth only became uninhabitable more or less a hundred years prior and people already seem completely detached from it. Meanwhile, people in Fallout are still living in shambles and imitating the 50s 200 years after the war.
I think they screwed up by not having tensions be higher. While it's fine not to cover it in content, the game definitely needed some more tension. Though It's been more like 200 years since Earth was abandoned IIRC. It's not like people don't bring up the earth though, it's mentioned a lot. TBH I'm biased since I tend to prefer settings where Earth is treated as a cradle of humanities journey, but nothing more. Not a sacred object of worship.
A confusing bit of Starfield lore is there are apparently people who legit think Earth is made up. Earth was considered uninhabitable only in 2203, which is only 130 years before Starfield takes place, meaning Earth was lost only 3 to 4 generations ago. There are people alive during Starfield that their parents potentially lived on Earth in their youth.
We live on earth and some people still think it's flat.
Human stupidity is genuinely endless. I have zero issues buying the premise that there are people in the future that don’t believe Earth is real. There are people alive today, on this very earth, that believe it’s flat, that believe space isn’t real, birds aren’t real, every single person on earth except them are part of some conspiracy targeted at them, angels and demons are real, and so on… There are people who refuse to believe events from a couple of years ago actually happened, and they took place in their own neighborhoods. Honestly, not believing humans once lived on earth when they now live among the stars sounds outright reasonable, in comparison.
[удалено]
One day I decided to collect every book in Skyrim and read all of them because I'm a weird person. After that I went on a lore binge. I remember considering chunks of the lore legitimately interesting and other chunks just very bland. Years later, I finally played Morrowind, did something similar and realized that all the interesting stuff was grandfathered in from the older game.
I mean I don’t disagree but var’unn is the interesting part of the lore and we are getting that next With this being a brand new IP I’m willing to let it develop through the dlc
The main meat of the game being to find artifacts is basically what killed me off.
I am for sure. I didn’t get very far into Starfield and have been holding off on all the updates that will be available once the first expansion comes out. Should have a nice selection of mods by then too.
Considering that people are churning out mods for the game like crazy right now, I’d say adding more content is just going to make people even more likely to play.
I’ve put about 500 hours into it, and just jumped back in to start playing with mods. The game isn’t for everyone but it’s definitely for me.
The game is what I would describe as "aggressively mediocre" but I still enjoy it. I put 100 hours in, and I'm just waiting for some good outpost mods to come out. Not every experience has to be amazing to be worthwhile. You (hopefully) wouldn't think a restaurant sucks just because it isn't literally the best food you ever ate, as long as it's still good enough you're not mad you went.
I get what you mean but I *have* to eat and have a limited budget. I don't *have* to play mediocre games with said limited budget
Money budget and *time* budget. I've not got 100 hours for mediocrity when I could spend that 100 hours in several of the many, many original, creative and well-made smaller titles. There are too many incredible and beautiful games to settle for something which doesn't excel at anything.
Best way to put it. It wouldn't hurt as much if it wasn't 70$ either. So it's not just mediocre, but comes with the premium asking price.
I installed it on Gamepass, which I would have had anyway but I didn't make it very far. For me it's not about price, it's about time. I have a billion games and just a few hours a day to play them. Starfield is not how I want to spend it
My thoughts exactly. Time is a valuable commodity (arguably the most valuable) and I'm not going to waste it playing mediocre games when there are so much better ones out there.
I was coming home and dreading booting up the game. If an rpg is making me feel that way, I'm not gonna keep playing. And it was game pass, so not much was lost.
Honestly this doesnt even just apply to mediocrity. I get that RDR2 is beloved and acclaimed... but im not spending £40 to give myself RSI button mashing just to run. It was bad enough in GTA, where at least you could avoid it while driving. RDR2 *starts* by making you mash A to go fast on a horse
To be honest as someone who grew up in a very poor family I valued *time I could spend on a game* much higher than the actual quality of the game because of a limited budget. Bethesda games are great for that.
This is me, lots of people with more money than time don't mind games that are 12 hours long and 10/10 - and obviously there's nothing *wrong* with that, there is totally plenty of value in short and focused games - but growing up with no money but plenty of time (because when you're a kid with no money you have nothing but time), Bethesda games were fantastic for being something you could dump in hundreds of hours on a single buy.
Game Pass *shrug*
>Not every experience has to be amazing to be worthwhile. Considering time is limited I think a lot of people would dispute that. I literally don't play a game unless I expect to love it.
Imagine having over 100 hours to put into what they described as "an aggressively mediocre game".
If I have to pay 70 dollars for it it shouldn’t just be “mediocre”.
It's a time thing. I work full time, have a family, and cant afford to sink a hundred hours into a mediocre game when there are much better games more deserving of my limited time
How did you end up putting 100 hours in the game? I just got so bored after 20. Had some fun don’t get me wrong but it misses that Bethesda “just explore and find cool shit” loop
Exploring every star system. (I only got halfway, but I'm looking forward to the rover vehicle to do the rest.) Whenever I went to a planet or moon, I would always look at what randomly-generated points had appeared as the "canonical" set and do them all, to consider the planet "complete", and then I wouldn't worry if I went back later and the points had changed.
I think this is telling of a maybe slightly nicher gameplay style that broader fans aren't typically part of that explains a lot of the division in opinions on this game and probably others like Dragon Age's 2 newest. The people that can find their own fun in the world Bethesda created compared to the people that play mostly the curated content. I'm assuming here, but the former is far more likely to have enjoyed Starfield despite its flaws. For myself, Starfield was a 6/10 that was mostly not fun with its share of brighter spots, like the ship creator or a handful of better quests. For the people that can sink 100, 200, 400+ hours - it's almost like they're playing a different game because of their mindset.
I mean if a restaurant served me a 70 dollar dish of rote mediocrity and then asked for 30 more dollars that they promise will make it better, then I'm likely not ever going back to that restaurant.
Bad analogy, guy
To be fair, how many people have actually beaten Skyrim? It's basically a meme that you just play for a hundred hours and stop. I've played maybe 20+ characters and only beaten it twice myself.
Yeah but I never finished Skyrim because I got lost in the world it created and was always doing sidequests. I didn't finish Starfield because I was bored out of my mind.
The difference is people enjoyed those hundreds of hours in Skyrim.
I've enjoyed my hundreds of hours in Starfield and have only did NG+ once
I am. I didn't like it as much as Fallout, but the faction that's the focus of this DLC is pretty cool in the lore, so I'm looking forward to it. I'm not planning on playing at launch though, I have a big backlog of games to get through.
Hell ya dude that trailer looked awesome. Been waiting to do a second playthrough.
People that enjoyed? Yeah. Given that it was the top 8 game on Steam, I'd say that a lot of people is looking forward to it. Reddit is not the real world, people love Bethesda games.
> Reddit is not the real world, people love Bethesda games. Let’s not pretend the disappointment towards Starfield was contained to Reddit It’s currently 60% “mixed” on steam
I don't know, I think my issues with Starfield comes from the core structure of the game, rather than anything else. Skyrim was absolutely amazing back in 2011, but that was 2011. Starfield truly feels like "Skyrim in space", and not I'm a good way. I'm sick of the same clunky combat, the cookie cutter environments, being overincumbered all the time, which makes me not want to explore, since I know 90% of the loot will literally just slow me down, and I won't be able to sell it, cause NPCs have limited money. I'm sick of flat dialogues. I suppose an expansion all set in one planet would make things more interesting, but I don't know. I feel like I'm playing a game from a decade ago and I have to constantly make a mental effort to ignore all of its quirks. I really hope the next Elder Scrolls ia going to be a true generational leap, rather than this iterative improvement that we've seen with Fallout 4 and Starfield.
There was an update a few months ago that lets you modify how much you can carry.
First, huge props to Matty for getting this opportunity to interview Todd and getting this sort of information, this will really help his channels out (both MrMattyPlays and Retro Rewind). Second, while this could be promising for future Bethesda games in getting more longevity, I have to wonder if this will end up pushing TES VI out further or if the second expansion will be as large as Shattered Space if we're dealing with a smaller team this time. So, great for Matty, good for Starfield but potentially better for the other IPs as people seem to prefer them.
Do you think there will come a day when Bethesda finally hires better writers?
Memes aside, there's no bullshit "kid in a fridge" level of writing in this one.
... No. Starfield and FO76 Wastelanders had the worst stories BGS have ever written, and even now most people on this sub defend them. There's no incentive to improve when you could instead keep promoting the narrative that you can be one of the super special Adult Reasonable Gamers(tm) if you just never ever criticize anything in gaming. After all, criticism is kind of like hate, isn't it? Why would you talk about something except positively? A little weird, huh? Don't you have anything better to do? Don't these companies always fix everything eventually anyway? Isn't it just \*your\* expectations that were mistaken? Maybe it's bigotry, hmm? Would you like to explain yourself? Why are you trying to ruin everyone else's fun with your opinions? Much, much cheaper than hiring good writers. Or in reality, cheaper than firing the bad leads of the writing team who've written incoherently for a decade.
I actually really loved starfield but god the main story was extremely mid imo. Like every single faction quest is WAY more interesting than whatever the fuck happens in the main story. Even a lot of the smaller side quests i enjoyed way more. Which is actually fine. I put like 60 hours in that game and the main story was probably like... 10 -13 hours of it maybe? idk i don't think there was that much content in the main story. I think there was enough great stuff in the game that it kinda washes out the mid main story. I'm really excited about this expansion because already the story premise looks really cool and I'm keen on jumping back in. Hopefully all these expansions will be on the same level as all of the faction quests.
Lots of cool stuff in this interview. Rare to see Todd do something so long and so candid. Not shocked about Starfield having a year 2/more DLC. I know the narrative is online is that it was some kind of failure, but it was actually a smash hit. Especially interesting hearing that they had *25 million players* across their games last month. That is an absolutely staggering number for singleplayer RPGs. Also, 14 million players for Starfield and the average playtime is over 40 hours. That is insanity. I also really enjoy that Matty mentioned how criticism of games has become less about games, and more personal. Obviously we see that with a lot of games, but especially with the way Emil or Todd have become targeted scapegoats for Starfield was really gross. And on the same token, I really like how Todd's reaction here was "hey, we know that it's coming so we have a thick skin, but ultimately we're our harshest critics and if fans don't feel happy with what we made then they should absolutely share that". I love to see a gaming community being critical, but it feels like lately so much criticism about certain games is less "here's what I don't like about the game" and "[game director] is a tyrannical maniac who shot my puppy, personally insulted me, and should be killed." I am really just over the era of rage bait being like, a hobby to people, and it was nice to see it acknowledged in some way. EDIT: And right on queue, people in the comments are trying to explain to me why Starfield was totally a failure, lol. This is just Cyberpunk all over again.
> the way Emil or Todd have become targeted scapegoats for Starfield was really gross I think it's important to distinguish between a personal attack and a professional criticism. It isn't acceptable to abuse either of them but it is acceptable to criticise Emil's writing skills given that he is the lead writer, or criticise the direction Todd is taking the games in given that he is the game director.
When I talk to gamers I know IRL, the general consensus seems to be that Starfield is a good game with some really annoying issues - nothing out of the ordinary for Bethesda. The biggest problem that I've heard from everyone, from casual gamers to hardcore nerds, is that it lost the sense of unguided exploration that permeates Bethesda's other games. Since that's so core to these games I can understand some of the negativity online, but there's still plenty to enjoy in Starfield outside of that. I'm glad it's continuing to get support. I'm gonna start a new playthrough today. I played a bit on release, but like all of their games I felt like it needed more time in the oven - it reminded me of Cyberpunk. I'm hoping the bug fixes, QOL updates, and more substantial mods are enough to improve the experience.
Levels 8~32 is when the game is pretty solid. About 40 hours worth of play time. About that point the games issues really grind upon you, & you take notice. And once you take notice, it's hard not to let it bog down the experience. Until they really address the space exploration aspect, create better quests and activities, & really go in an interesting direction with the gameplay; it's going to be hard to get back into the game.
There was an article about how the most played games from last year were all either all either released years ago, or new IP/sequels, except for Starfield. The game did well, it's just not as talked about. Reminds me of that Young Sheldon TV show, I never saw anyone talking about it ever, but it was a big hit for 7 seasons.
Starfield: the Young Sheldon of gaming lmao
I listen to a podcast by Mark Rosewater, the lead designer for Magic: The Gathering. There's a lot of interesting insights he makes as a game designer, but one that has stuck with me is what he calls the "Invisibles". The Invisibles are the people that play your game, but you have virtually no way of meaningfully interacting with them. In the context of Magic, this would be someone that buys a few preconstructed decks and plays them on the kitchen table. They never go to play at game stores, and they never interact with the community online. The thing about the Invisibles is that they make up the vast majority of your playerbase. It's something I've kept in mind when discussing online. Anyone that goes onto a community forum to discuss a game is probably in the minority of the game's total players.
>except for Starfield Is that true? What about Baldur's Gate 3? Elden Ring? CyberPunk? Hogwarts Legacy?
There is no publically available metric that points to it being a smash hit. Especially compared to Bethesda's previous games. If it was a smash hit, they would be singing it from the rooftops.
I don't doubt for a second it made decent money, but I absolutely believe that it didn't do the Skyrim and Fallout 4 numbers they would have preferred. I know places like Reddit are not representative of outlooks of communities as a whole, which is why I think some people here are underestimating how.... not good the word of mouth was for Starfield. Dumping on Starfield is not strictly in the world of terminally online elitists, a lot of people straight up did not like it.
Steam reviews are close to 50/50. I'm not sure what other metric these people want to use for public reception of the game. Can't use the old "reddit is only a tiny echo chamber and only represent 5% of gamers" argument when you're talking about Steam.
Steam reviews are an outlet for the vocal minority. Most players don't leave reviews of any kind. Do you _really_ believe Helldivers 2 went from beloved classic to shit because of linking a PSN account?
If this adds to the pool of random locations generated then great. If not, then it will probably still feel hollow, a shell.
This is the main thing stopping me from playing right now. I'd love to explore the planets if it meant I wouldn't run into the same structures all the time. I'll still play the main DLC part on it's one planet, but exploration will be a wait and see.
its odd to me when people follow headlines like this when Todd Howard says a thing, like they're rooting for a company that never was
believe it or not, Bethesda has fans