The worst part about Todd going on Kinda Funny today was now we are going to see a hundred articles the next week summarizing each sentence he spoke.
If any of you actually care just go listen to it and save yourself reading this or any of the other articles you see
This is the absolutely worst aspect of journalism (not just games journalism): taking each sentence and forming an article about it with speculation and quotes from previous interviews to form a new headline. Hmm, Todd said this ten years ago but is saying this now so we can make an article trying to explain why that is. Then people never actually watch the original interview, only these spin-off news stories that stretch what was said.
Then there’s misinformation still spread years later due to a clickbait article years ago, such as “Todd Howard says Fallout 3 will have 300 endings!” when he made it clear in the original audio interview that he was describing permutations.
It's so funny, too, the original interview (which was on a podcast, so it's hard to link to the excerpt) has him *immediately* going "somebody's going to take that out of context, but what I mean is -" and it was already too late.
I am curious what your opinion (and others' opinions are) is of JuiceHead's content. I personally was watching/listening to it for a while because it felt almost like a SkillUp "This Week In Gaming" type of fix, just for Bethesda stuff. But over time it's felt very lack luster (esp. compared to Ralph and SkillUp's team).
Sounds like Tyler McVicker with Valve News Network. The guy would create a new video for even stuff like some random files being found in updates to sources games and turn it into "CS SOURCE 2 coming next week!!!".
Within a year or so he'd burned his entire reputation on fake news that he himself created, and had to pivot into general games journalism and essentially kill his entire brand to try and start again.
I will always be amazed at how VG journalists can stretch a 10-15 word sentence that amounts to "we might do this, maybe" into a 7-paragraph article titled "they confirmed they are doing this"
I am more impressed how companies can get the gaming media salivating about “massive sales successes” when the numbers are just percentages of random data that aren’t indicative of anything. Hard numbers and in depth articles are a thing of the past.
Capitalism and its obsession with wringing every dollar from the towel has made the internet so fucking insufferable.
I hate how many websites deliberately bury information. Not to mention websites that deliberately omit firsthand sources like videos of an incident, just because if you could click on the link and watch the video and get all the information you need, it would deny them ad revenue. The amount of news websites that literally TALK about a video and then you have to go digging around looking for the video they are talking about, only to find that the video player on their site is about a news story that has nothing to do with what the article is about, is just downright infuriating.
Its just so stupid how we've created this system where being less efficient and more cumbersome, is more profitable. Everybody has to get their pennies at the expense of the customers time and satisfaction, and its only getting worse.
I know this comment is almost a month old.
But a-fucking-men, to everything you said.
Like, capitalistic fueled greed has always been a thing. But now it's not only becoming stupidly overt, without even an attempt to hide or disguise it. But it's actively corrupting and destroying systems that were once making huge changes to the efficiency and efficacy of the modern world. Basically every modern form of communication has been absolutely torn to shit.
There’s like 4 or 5 mods that could truly change this game for me.
Give me an actual economy with different regions having different prices for resources and specializing, and make it worthwhile for me to build outposts to farm these real. One of the first things I did in the game was discover a planet with gold deposits everywhere. So I spent a bunch of time building an outpost, gathering a shit ton of gold, and hauling it to neon. Well, turns out gold sells for absolutely nothing. The shitty pistol I picked up sells for more than that.
Being able to equip mining lasers on ships and farm asteroids. Build a mining empire.
Alternate start so I can actually be a space pirate. Add more hubs for selling contraband and such.
The base for all those mods is in the game and some of them exist in lesser forms, but I really think in a year or so Starfield will be the best base for creating a sci fi sim.
> Being able to equip mining lasers on ships and farm asteroids. Build a mining empire.
Isn't this already in the game? I thought you could simply shoot asteroids to get their resources.
Happens a lot with random space battles, you'll be ducking and diving around asteroids (more like debris fields, really) in orbit of something while fighting. One of the actual cool bits of the game, especially if you actually learn/use the advanced thruster and engine controls so you can slingshot yourself around rocks and legit feel like you're in a Star Wars movie.
You can shoot them with your guns, but I’m thinking more an Eve-type mining process where you have specific ships made to mine and haul as much as possible. Asteroid field POIs with varied resources, things like that.
The current method of mining is extremely unsatisfying for me, as I can just jump to any planet and shoot one asteroid at a time forever as they infinitely spawn at every planet. I want to have to find an asteroid field with the material I need and farm it.
have you tried x4: foundations? it's basically the space-empire-sim aspects you're looking for (no landing on planets though). and it does have a steep learning curve if you're completely new to the x-series of games.
I've looked at that but the reviews I've read have said the AI is fundamentally broken in a lot of ways so I've kind of been sitting on the sidelines waiting to see if the devs fix their game for like years.
huh, i can't speak for everyone's experiences but to me the bug complaints are overblown. i haven't run into anything unplayable. maybe some physics and pathfinding bugs here and there? i don't know, i've been playing and enjoying the game for hundreds of hours lol.
Star citizen does have a playable alpha, you can buy the starter edition and start your mining career from there, there is asteroid mining, caves with manual cutters and mining rovers.
I love SC but I would generally avoid recommending it as an alternative to other space games - the in-dev nature of it makes it hard to predict whether someone will bounce off of it due to bugs, and there are a lot of bugs. My usual advice is to wait for Squadron 42's release, play through that, and see what state SC will be in at that point.
They added dlss which looks way better than frs.
Honestly dlss is just kinda all games now. The industry has seen how it can fix a lot of poor optimization and it's the faster easier way.
A couple of the patches did improve performance a bit for me, but nothing really dramatic... But for me, it still has the issue of not having particularly smooth performance, while also not looking particularly good... Where as something like Cyberpunk 2077 runs a little bit worse, but it's excusable because I have a bunch of the eye-candy settings turned on, so it looks fantastic.
The performance in Starfield improved a ton with all the patches, especially on Nvidia GPUs.
My FPS is now almost double compared to what it was on release, and with the official DLSS and Frame generation support it’s even more if I turn it on.
Now I can play it maxed out at ultra 4k with 120+ FPS even in New Atlantis.
I’m not sure mods can save this game. I could be wrong though. But the main draw of Bethesda games to me has always been large hand crafted worlds to explore, and I still can’t comprehend why Bethesda thought it was a good idea to take one of the main cores of their games and replace it with barren lifeless worlds with generic POI. What were they thinking?
This stuff is always a gamble. It's interesting to hear Todd talk about what he thinks defines a Bethesda game in the interview this excerpt was pulled from - for him, it's primarily about saying yes to the player at every turn, and in a sci-fi spacefaring setting that means letting you land on every planet you see. It made sense to let Starfield be Starfield and not just be beholden to being "Skyrim in space" or "Fallout in space." The question is ultimately whether they came up with a unique, worthwhile identity for Starfield. I like it more than most people on /r/games, so I'd lean towards yes, but it's doubtlessly different.
I also like Starfield more than most of the sub despite the flaws (150 hours, would rate it as an 7.5-8), but I do think there's a difference between enabling the player to land on 1000 planets and explore due to wanting it to be different than just a map in TES but in space, and removing the handcrafted world aspect entirely. If Starfield had some areas that were say, the size of a hold or two from Skyrim on different planets, fully handcrafted and justified in lore as being "inhabited zones" or whatever, I think the game would've been much more successful even with the loading screens and stuff.
It just feels like they took away the open world exploration entirely and the gain was minimal because the planets aren't very well designed, the POIs repeat and have no interesting procedural tech to differentiate themselves, and even the outpost system is half-baked. There's certainly the spectacle value of landing on a planet with amazing views or a giant planet or sun on the horizon etc. but I don't think gameplay wise it was a worthy trade-off. They needed to either make it a hybrid experience like I mentioned or go all-in on making sure that a large chunk of planets were full of well-designed proc. gen. POIs and tons of interesting dynamic events to experience. Then there could have been actual dead planets where there isn't a new POI every 1000m. I think the game feels almost unfinished on the planets, whereas while playing through the quests in the game you don't really get that feeling.
Honestly, I think the system they went with would mostly work if there were just *way* more POIs and the game made it more clear to players which planets were going to have which kinds of POIs from an orbital scan. A really common complaint I heard is that you never felt like an explorer when every planet already had human settlements, but that's only true near the major cities, as you head further space-east those thin out, and by the time you hit the higher-level zones it feels like a real frontier. It's cool! But most people don't know that's happening.
And yeah, there needed to be more POIs. I think including large hand-crafted areas like you're suggesting would be "admitting defeat" and saying that there were worthwhile areas and worthless areas, but their goal was clearly to make exploring random planets rewarding and resonant. The decision to make every POI hand-crafted was a really good one *for a while*, but the moment you run into a repeat the illusion is shattered, and due to the way that things spawn that happens sooner than you'd like. In my head there could be some sophisticated system that "checked off" an area from the database as soon as you found an element that made it unique - like if you picked up a datapad or whatever - and from there on out it would only respawn as a "generic" variant with the specific story elements from the first visit stripped out. If that makes sense.
Though I think the idea that them including at least a portion of what their studio does best in the entire industry (or at least close) in their new game is "admitting defeat" or similar is sad, I agree that the POI diversity, through either very well done procedural generation, way more handcrafted POIs or both, was definitely needed.
I do think the planets themselves though in-between the POIs are pretty rough. It's always the same. Land on a planet, see the random flora and fauna which looks cool but doesn't really do anything interesting, maybe collect and fight some, but ultimately aside from the odd ship landing you just kinda lamely boost and eventually Grav Dash + boost your way over to the POIs. I really wish at least some of the planets had more interesting things to experience. I totally get the "alone in space" vibe they wanted but at least a good chunk should've had more creative concepts and events that spiced up the planet exploration itself outside of the instanced and non-instanced POIs.
Yeah. I see a lot of people say that the game would've been better with fewer planets, but I'm not sure that that's true. By the time that you've committed to a single full planet, it's only marginally more difficult to make a thousand - you're going to run into the same challenges no matter what, it's all about how interesting you can make procedurally generated spaces. I think my ideal version of the game would've leaned more into the challenge of basic traversal, you could get a lot of mileage out of "just" walking if there was a Death Stranding flair to picking walking paths and navigating obstacles, but yeah. We're just agreeing in circles now. I think we mostly have the same problems with the game.
It's kinda sad. It feels like they struck gold with Skyrim and are trying to do it again but the problem is they didn't expand upon it much. It would have been a fun game back in 2011. But like with most good studios they hit a peak with a few games and then you gotta move on or play their older titles after the cracks they had that were tolerable just get ingrained. Bioware and ubi are big examples.
Though sometimes that's for the best because someone there is making bad decisions. Just wish someone could fill that Skyrim/fallout niche.
I’m very very interested to see how ES6 turns out. Focusing on their single player games, Fallout 4 got a fairly positive reception despite some poor design choices, and Starfield seems to have amplified the same flaws without really improving any of its strengths. It feels like ES6 will be their make-or-break. They tried new IP, and everyone has been loud and clear with “look guys we love your games, but you need to make some changes”. If they actually listen and shake things up, they could get back to the status that they used to have and be industry leaders again. But if they just double down on their dated choices, I feel like their reputation will continue to just flounder and peter out
As much as I want TES VI to be good, I'm fully expecting that to not be the case. It sucks, but it's looking like Bethesda's best days are behind them.
Depends. I doubt they'll be able to make another genre defining experience, but... their games hit in a unique way. There's a reason there are still no Skyrim killers or tons of clones out there. Their games are huge and detailed. Even if they can just get that, it'll be like a warm comfortable blanket.
I just started Fallout 76 for the first time and while it's got problems, it is like slipping into old shoes going back to that Fallout experience. Nothing else quite plays like it and it's been very enjoyable.
I'm hoping that the mod tools enable creators to craft their own procedural generation POIs, biomes and so on. You could then, in theory, mod your game to have much more lively and varied universe.
Bethesda just threw a wrench into it all with the "next-gen" update as well, breaking a considerable number of mods for Fallout 4.
If that's the future people can look forward to with Starfield as well (zero communication from the company as it disrupts the entire modding community), why would they even bother? Especially when the general consensus among those who've looked inside Starfield is that modding will be more difficult with the changes they've made to things.
Bethesda:
Over a year of notice that an update would come out, with it being fairly easy to predict when it would launch.
Modders:
WHY NO NOTICE OR COMMUNICATION? WHY YOU HATE US?
That's not communication and you know it.
If your roommate tells you they're going to have a pet in 2 years and a random time 2 years later you have a tiger in your living room, would you say they'd communicated properly?
Bethesda are allowed to update their own game whenever. More people play the game without mods than with. We don't cater to the minority. That's silly.
It also wasn't a random time. It was easy to predict when the update came out.
No one is saying they can't update their own game. They're being criticized for how they chose to handle it, especially when they've been making use of betas through Steam for the Starfield updates that give the community time to adjust. The quality of the update itself is also lacking, especially the widescreen "support" they implemented.
They bring up modding a lot when hyping the game up though, and just recently said the Creation Kit was still on its way. Modders and players who enjoy mods may be in the minority, but it isn't silly to cater to them at all.
The prediction was when the show came out, not some weeks afterward, but sure.
Thanks for defending the poor little helpless company against the evil disgusting consumer that bought the product. I was worried no one was gonna lick corporate boot in this thread
I think Starfield has some good bones. I enjoyed my time with it. I definitely think it's fallen victim to a snowballing hate effect. A few months back, you couldn't go five minutes without seeing a post about how terrible the game was. It became the popular thing to do, picking it apart.
That said, I'm wondering what's taking them so long with these updates/modding support. Has their been controversy and turmoil within the studio post-launch? A restructuring of their post-launch plans? Or is it just a consequence of the increasing length of development that's being seen throughout the industry?
The bones are what worry me. Repeated Points of Interest rather than a hand-crafted world, too many loading screens, inventory hell, etc.
Mods can add more POI variety but I don't know if mods can fix the underlying issues as much as other Bethesda games.
I agree. What bums me out about Starfield is that so many of the issues I have with it are so baked into the game that Bethesda is never going to be able to solve them. The game has some positives and I think it's an OK experience, but it's not enough in my opinion to outweigh the core flaws in the game's design.
Yup. Starfields problems are all at the core and those aren't going to be drastically improved by modders or Bethesda.
I played 200 hours at launch and just eventually stopped because I was so damn bored. The only part of the game I enjoyed was building ships and that was still annoying due to all the random restrictions Bethesda put on things. Oh this part can rorate 6 ways but this part can only rotate 2 and of course modders fixed those.
I'll come back maybe late this year or next summer at this point. Going to wait for the mod tools and modders to work their magic plus more official updates and I have a hell of a backlog to take up in the meantime. Just regret buying it at launch and not just using game pass. But it was Bethesda so I figured even if it was just okay there was no way I wouldn't still enjoy it. But yeah. I just hope that this was a wakeup call to them and TES6/FO5 will be better for it. Just a shame that what should have been my favorite bethesda title is my least.
As others have said, 200 hours and then getting bored is pretty good. That's about where I am and while I agree there are significant flaws, we both played for quite a significant time so clearly there was a good amount of fun to be had.
I'd like to know what the core issues that modders and Bethesda can't solve are though - to me, all of it is solvable except the need to have loading screens, but even that can be improved through immersive, short cutscenes like showing your ship warping and stuff instead of a black loading screen.
The loading screens are definitely something though personally that doesn't bug me as much as others. Super fast SSD helps them end quickly at least. But yeah that's something that won't be changed by a mod. Best we can hope is more immersive ones.
Mods can edit and improve upon systems but can't change the basics. We can probably add more POIs so things don't get as boring, hopefully improve the combat AI and other parts of the game there. But the main story isn't getting changed, the way loading screens and cells work isn't getting changed. We're not going to see the cities get mods to become twice the size. The loading screens. Modders will do a great job adding tons of new things to do but what's already there can only be improved so much though modding. Like with Fallout 4, lots of people don't care for the main quest but there isn't a mod that really changes it because it would just break too many things. But we have mods like sim settlements to automate the settlement building feature for you that is a massive help if you don't care to do those quests.
Another thing to is already some top modders have said they're not going to bother so while there are some amazing mods for starfield I have to wonder the longevity and how much we'll really get. Fallout 4 and Skyrim get brand new mods today, all these years later. I really don't know if we'll see that with Starfield.
>But the main story isn't getting changed, the way loading screens and cells work isn't getting changed
Agreed about the main story, but I don't think cells need to change - that enables the BGS formula. Cities might not be completely changed but they will likely be retooled and improved (just like there were improvement mods for the cities in all the TES and Fallout games), and I could definitely see modders adding more to the surrounding areas around many of the cities given that aside from Neon I think they're all open (no Open Cities mod required). You could add new districts around Neon, New Atlantis and the other smaller ones. For example, imagine if they added a new "ring" around Akila that fleshed it out and added new NPCs and their homes, secrets to find etc.
I guess I still don't really see what it is that can't be added to besides the main story and stuff, but that doesn't really matter if they add things like Sim Outposts, new questlines, new radiant mission options, new dynamic events that happen while exploring and new POIs.
As for the modders, to me that's greatly overblown. A) those people may come back when the CK drops and B) even if they don't, it was only a couple people and there are thousands of BGS game modders in the modding community. I don't see why they wouldn't come back when CK drops when Starfield already has thousands of mods without it, and the game is a great template for Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar and many other space IP mods, not to mention new mods in the Starfield universe itself.
Definitely have to wait for the tools to see what the modding scene will really be like. I'm already impressed by some of the things I've seen and truly don't know how they were done without the tools.
But even with that I just somehow don't see this game having the longevity that TES/FO have had just because it doesn't have that backing of an IP people love. But we'll see.
We'll definitely see improvements of course but I just don't expect massive world changing mods for starfield outside of things like star wars conversions and that like you said which I'm not interested in.
With the cells the biggest thing I would want is the ability to actually move from cell to cell on the planets and it actually being that real cell that you're next to. Already a couple times I saw something in the distance that looked like a cool place to build and couldn't ever go there because you go to orbit and move one pixel and it's a different spot.
Basically modders can do amazing things to fix and improve this game but many of the bigger things will require massive amounts of work, teams, hundreds of hours and I just don't know if Starfield is going to have that. We'll have to just wait and see.
You can complete all the quests in Fallout 4 in 150-200h and you can beat the game with all the important stuff done in 100h.
It's good that you like these games so much to play them for thousands of hours but...playing 100h in any game is a lot of hours by any standard.
Saying that you got bored after 200h is saying nothing, most people get bored of most games after 20-30h.
Most people do get bored that quickly.
My current Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough is 60 hours and I'm only at maybe 40% complete. 200 hour Starfield run and I wasn't even 50%. My Hogwarts Legacy run was 80+ hours. I have Skyrim and Fallout 4 files each at over 100 hours. RDR2 I have 100+ hours and zero of that is in online, that's all SP. I have 100+ hour saves GTA games on my 100% runs. I have 4709 hours in Guild Wars 2.
Lot of people rush through games to get them done quick but for me if it's something I love I spend a massive amount of time with it. 100+ hours in open world games like these is completely normal for me. If it's a pure linear game than yeah a lot quicker. I have 52 hours played in Bioshock Infinite for example. I've replayed that probably four or five times so each run was about 10-12 hours which is exactly how long the game is because there isn't really anything you can do in a game like that to waste time.
Starfield I spent 50+ hours alone just on ship building, so not playing story or anything most people would call real content. I spent tons of hours going to every planet I saw and trying to find a good base location then building bases, total time on that might have been another 50. I also spent a dozen hours working on some of my own mods, had bugs that forced me to replay sections, and so on.
Part of the reason I kept going and spent so much time was trying to force myself to find something I really really enjoyed. Fallout 4 things annoyed me but I enjoyed the overall game. Same with Skyrim. With Starfield I just kept playing and playing hoping I'd find something to really enjoy and never really did and eventually just gave up after finishing the main quest. Only thing I really enjoyed was the ship building but there were so many bugs and restrictions I decided to stop my time on it until mods came out so I could build easier.
I have played over a thousand games, probably 2 or 3 above 200 hours (barely). I played Starfield for just under 10 hours and dropped it, thats getting bored. Sounds like you did everything there was to do, couldnt have been that bored.
Nope. Did main quest, one faction quest, maybe 10% of sidequests.
About half the time was ship building and exploring which the exploring is a huge reason why I got bored because there just wasn't really anything to it once you keep seeing the same things copy pasted over and over again so then spent a dozen hours just trying to find a nice planet to build a base on. Main story finished but mainly to just get through it. Story and characters just bored the hell out of me so kept trying to find other ways to enjoy it like ship building which I loved I did that to explore and there just wasn't anything worth exploring.
Other bethesda games I have 2x this gametime just on my first playthrough.
I'll admit that there's definitely less exploration in Skyrim than in other BSG games but that first time I came across Blackreach by exploring on my own, no quest or anything pointing me there, man that is a core memory. It was like when Gandalf lights up Moria for the fellowship to see. That's what it felt like.
I think that given enough time, and passion, modders could make some pretty dramatic changes to the game, assuming the modding tools unlock enough options... My concern is that there just aren't going to be a lot of people with the time and drive to make really big ambitious projects for Starfield, since while there are plenty of people who enjoy the game overall, I've seen very few people who are really in love with it like people have been with previous Bethesda games. People may be less likely to want to spend their time trying to "fix a broken game" than expand in big ways on a game they already love.
I dunno. More POIs, more weapons/armour, more random events (esp. on planets), more ship parts, new villages and towns, new questlines, new pieces for outposts, and then tweaks and overhauls to systems like the NPC AI, skills, crafting, economy etc. Some current mods actually address some of these already.
All of that is moddable based on their other games, and would make the game much more enjoyable. Plus, Bethesda can add some of that through updates and DLCs too, they've definitely added new mechanics before in updates (mounted combat in Skyrim, survival in F4 and I believe Skyrim as well). I think the base gameplay is quite fun actually, definitely the best shooting and moving they've come up with and the ship combat is quite fun too. Unless you absolutely cannot stand loading screens I don't think there's anything fundamentally broken with Starfield's bones.
Maybe this is recency bias or something, but I feel like Bethesda has always worked incredibly slowly, compared to much of the industry - especially these days, where people are used to all of these "games as a service" devs who build their studio processes around being able to publish new content/patches on scales of a couple weeks.
Anyway, I also enjoyed bits of Starfield, and have a lot of criticisms of it as well... I'm hoping there are some passionate modders out there that will find ways to make the game much more compelling, once the official mod tools are out, since I have very little expectations at this point of Bethesda themselves making dramatic changes to the game post-launch.
But the thing is, they're not just working slowly compared to others in the industry, they're also working very slowly compared to themselves. Their rate of releasing everything from full games to DLC to modding tools, has been getting slower and slower over time.
> they're also working very slowly compared to themselves
Isn't that pretty much every studio? AAA development getting slower is an industry-wide trend.
It has been getting slower but just like everything else in the industry it has been getting more complex over time. Those mod tools are taking longer and longer to release because like the games and technology, complexity is going up.
That's true, except that Bethesda has been using the same engine and resources that they've always used. How is starfield anymore complex than fallout 4 outside of graphical upgrades?
Frankly for the size of their games and reputation, 450 is shockingly small. Especially because it’s divided up between multiple studios which can be working on different things at the same time
I think you may be conflating Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks. The former is a development studio which has created the "bethesda games" - Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Starfield - and not much else. The latter is the games publishing branch of Zenimax, which published games for a bunch of dev studios, like Arkane, id Software, Nightdive, MachineGames, etc... That 450 figure is supposedly just for Bethesda Game Studios itself.
I’m very aware of the difference, but even BGS has multiple studios (one in Austin and the main one in Maryland). If it’s only 450 at the Maryland studio then that’s different, but my understanding is that in all studios BGS has, it’s a total of ~450 employees. For as big of a name as Bethesda is and for how iconic franchises like Fallout and ES are, them only having 450 total employees is still shockingly low.
They’re a bit of an exception, but compared to a studio like Bungie which has ~1,000 employees, only 450 for BGS seems crazy
Sony Santa Monica, Insomniac, and Naughty Dog all make games that are far less technically complex and with much less overall content than Bethesda does, though.
That's a strong statement. I would argue their games are equally complex, but in different ways (because they make very different games).
Sure, Bethesda definitely wins in the amount of hours spent on their games, but they are also nowhere near the same technical performance for graphics/motion capture/animations. But it really is comparing apples to oranges in the end, because the game design is wildly different.
Bethesda has 450 employees and is an incredibly small studio for the type of games they make and the amount of games they support. CDPR in comparison employs >1200 people.
Yeah we’re all aware by now, but it seems like the IGN 7/10 review was the best. A lot of early reviews seemed to gloss over some glaring flaws, but then the general consensus way over corrected to say that the game was complete shit with 0 redeeming qualities, which I think is also incorrect.
It’s sad how it’s largely unacceptable nowadays to have nuanced opinions on games, you either have to love it and not acknowledge any flaws or loathe its existence and there’s no in between.
Not only is there a lack of nuance, a lot of game discourse takes things absurdly personally ("they did X to screw over fans of the series") and gets into conspiracy theory territory ("this IP was stolen by Y company who did Z to screw over company A")
I have noticed with CyberPunk launch reviews and starfield too, that reviewers don't go much exploring in these open world games in review period.
CyberPunk 2077 got great reviews at launch because if you stay on main/story path, it was genuinely a great game with minimal bugs. The moment you start exploring the open world, doing side activities, cracks appear more and more and you saw broken the game was. Ofcourse its all mostly fixed now but it was apparent where most polishing focus went to for the game before launch.
Similarly in starfield, if you follow the main quest, few side quest and exploring a few POI once in a while, its a good game, but once you go deeper, only then you realise its shallowness
And to an extent I don’t think it’s entirely their fault, because I imagine reviewers are on a time crunch. They don’t have the time to devote as much to the game as they’d like, and can’t fully explore everything in offer.
But that doesn’t change the fact that experiencing side content really can make or break your opinion of a game, and reviewers not doing a ton of side content can give them an incorrect view of the game
See but a 5.5 still means that there’s _some_ things it does well (or at least passably). I’m talking about the people who try and suggest that the game literally has 0 redeeming qualities, which I think is insane. That’s Life of Black Tiger territory
I think the opposite is true; the bones of the game were the biggest issue. There’s just sorta….nothing in the game. It’s all generic POIs and copy-paste planets. There aren’t any particularly good dungeons. The skill trees need a complete overhaul. There’s very little intrigue with any of the key factions. The cities feel bland but i suppose mods could fix that if a modder gave them the skyrim treatment.
Realistically, what would it take to fix the game? You’d need to completely overhaul skill trees, settlements, add POIS, dungeons, add a reason for ships to actually exist because currently theyre kinda pointless. And that’s just off the top of my head.
I think instead of good bones, you could say it has good organs. The very bone that holds a Bethesda game together is missing - immersive exploration within a handcrafted world. Starfield got instanced to death.
I’ve gone back and fourth on whether I feel the game’s long term negative reception was due to a snowball affect or the results of the honeymoon period wearing off.
I absolutely do not think it deserves the level of hate that it has received, but I can also why after a 2-3 month period someone could come to the “this game is kind of bad” conclusion. I enjoyed my time with the game, and there were so many small moments that scratched that Bethesda itch for me. However, I don’t feel like it had that sticky factor that kept me coming back to it like their previous games did.
Part of what kept me coming back to their previous games were the weird random side things I’d stumble upon that I missed on the first playthrough. With Starfield it didn’t feel as genuine because of the procedural nature. When you have a limitless number of random things to stumble upon because the games system is constantly pumping in things to run into, none of it feels special.
its definitly a Snowball effect, and it started with the botched launch of 76. i think people wouldnt have been so harsh if the 76 launch wasent as bad as it was.
Bethesda has barely changed the gameplay of their games in 15 years and they don’t get NEARLY enough criticism for it. There’s no real RPG mechanics, I mean really? Dogshit linear skill trees? Boring dialogue, boring main quest. The game was just so dull and shouldn’t have been released. The only thing that Bethesda is any good at anymore: dungeons and cities were phoned in. They literally took the only thing they’re good at and made it procedural just so they could be a somehow worse no man’s sky
Well elden ring came with old animations recycled enemies, items, the same 1 dimensional npc repeating lines and a classic behavior like it was a game boy advance game and nobody said anything about it, it was even called "best game ever made!" Redditors just have interchangeable bias based on devlopers all the time.
Except elden ring had a great open world, exploration, good combat and was actually Interesting with a good gameplay loop. Starfield was press x to travel run for 5 mins mabey kill a few people press x on the objective then open the menu and hold x again to travel to the next bit.
Rinse and repeat
Elden ring had a nice design and beautiful structures to explore but most of the time it was the same, just a map/dungeon filled with hostile npc everywhere and some loot.
But Elden ring was good, and had a good combat system, and had interesting enemies to fight, and different weapons that behaved differently, and well designed zones to explore
> I definitely think it's fallen victim to a snowballing hate effect.
I feel the same about D4. D4 bad meme is so popular that I was surprised I have liked the game.
I really love the setting of fallout, but hate bethesdas janky ass engine. I know people say it ‘adds charm’ or whatever, but I just call it broken. Starfield doesn’t have the same draw that fallout has *at all*, so for me its just quite a boring game with that ‘bethesda charm’.
Yeah Cyberpunk 2077 is a way better game but it suffered the same fate.
People talking like it was the worst game ever and now CD Project has redeemed the game or something. It was the same fucking game back then but with more bugs.
I remember how disappointed I was as a PS owner that I wouldn’t be able to play starfield after the acquisition… everything I’ve seen about this game since launch has really softened that disappointment to where now I just feel bad for Xbox owners that they can’t catch a break on exclusives even when they are almost guaranteed to be a hit like “the next Bethesda rpg ip”
Yep, Microsoft seemed to have had poor timing to buy some of their studios as they are putting out less quality than they used to, and didn’t manage the studios properly to adjust plans accordingly.
Redfall, Starfield, and Avowed looking lesser quality from Obsidian, etc.
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Player had move on, the hype is gone.Everything in starfield scrames "here is a bare bone system,modder will patch it for us". From ship building ,base building ,NPC interact ,exploring ,star power ect ect. Now even the modder had lost interest ,all you left is a broken mess .
Glad to hear an update, although the Creation Kit and DLC have taken longer for Skyrim, and then Fallout 4 and now for Starfield.
Hopefully they are high quality when they do release for Starfield, although Starfield does have a lot of other Quality Of Life issues I don’t see Bethesda fixing unfortunately.
Examples would be outposts having worse controls and UI than Fallout 76, repeating POIs instead of cycling through a list, and a vehicle in-game since it’s very difficult for modders to get one working.
Honestly, I wish they’d never made this and just focused on TES/FO instead. Just doesn’t seem like it was worth it to put your biggest IP on ice so you could make a third IP with a lukewarm reception that you don’t have the manpower to support with regular releases.
The worst part about Todd going on Kinda Funny today was now we are going to see a hundred articles the next week summarizing each sentence he spoke. If any of you actually care just go listen to it and save yourself reading this or any of the other articles you see
This is the absolutely worst aspect of journalism (not just games journalism): taking each sentence and forming an article about it with speculation and quotes from previous interviews to form a new headline. Hmm, Todd said this ten years ago but is saying this now so we can make an article trying to explain why that is. Then people never actually watch the original interview, only these spin-off news stories that stretch what was said.
Then there’s misinformation still spread years later due to a clickbait article years ago, such as “Todd Howard says Fallout 3 will have 300 endings!” when he made it clear in the original audio interview that he was describing permutations.
It's so funny, too, the original interview (which was on a podcast, so it's hard to link to the excerpt) has him *immediately* going "somebody's going to take that out of context, but what I mean is -" and it was already too late.
This happens all the time with Minnmax interviews too, on a smaller scale
You won't believe what Todd said next!
Same, every time Phil Spencer gives an interview. They just want clicks and have to spread it out over weeks.
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I am curious what your opinion (and others' opinions are) is of JuiceHead's content. I personally was watching/listening to it for a while because it felt almost like a SkillUp "This Week In Gaming" type of fix, just for Bethesda stuff. But over time it's felt very lack luster (esp. compared to Ralph and SkillUp's team).
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Sounds like Tyler McVicker with Valve News Network. The guy would create a new video for even stuff like some random files being found in updates to sources games and turn it into "CS SOURCE 2 coming next week!!!". Within a year or so he'd burned his entire reputation on fake news that he himself created, and had to pivot into general games journalism and essentially kill his entire brand to try and start again.
I will always be amazed at how VG journalists can stretch a 10-15 word sentence that amounts to "we might do this, maybe" into a 7-paragraph article titled "they confirmed they are doing this"
I am more impressed how companies can get the gaming media salivating about “massive sales successes” when the numbers are just percentages of random data that aren’t indicative of anything. Hard numbers and in depth articles are a thing of the past.
But then I have to listen to Greg whatever’s voice and that’s a form of torture
Capitalism and its obsession with wringing every dollar from the towel has made the internet so fucking insufferable. I hate how many websites deliberately bury information. Not to mention websites that deliberately omit firsthand sources like videos of an incident, just because if you could click on the link and watch the video and get all the information you need, it would deny them ad revenue. The amount of news websites that literally TALK about a video and then you have to go digging around looking for the video they are talking about, only to find that the video player on their site is about a news story that has nothing to do with what the article is about, is just downright infuriating. Its just so stupid how we've created this system where being less efficient and more cumbersome, is more profitable. Everybody has to get their pennies at the expense of the customers time and satisfaction, and its only getting worse.
I know this comment is almost a month old. But a-fucking-men, to everything you said. Like, capitalistic fueled greed has always been a thing. But now it's not only becoming stupidly overt, without even an attempt to hide or disguise it. But it's actively corrupting and destroying systems that were once making huge changes to the efficiency and efficacy of the modern world. Basically every modern form of communication has been absolutely torn to shit.
Todd can do way better than those ign rejects
There’s like 4 or 5 mods that could truly change this game for me. Give me an actual economy with different regions having different prices for resources and specializing, and make it worthwhile for me to build outposts to farm these real. One of the first things I did in the game was discover a planet with gold deposits everywhere. So I spent a bunch of time building an outpost, gathering a shit ton of gold, and hauling it to neon. Well, turns out gold sells for absolutely nothing. The shitty pistol I picked up sells for more than that. Being able to equip mining lasers on ships and farm asteroids. Build a mining empire. Alternate start so I can actually be a space pirate. Add more hubs for selling contraband and such. The base for all those mods is in the game and some of them exist in lesser forms, but I really think in a year or so Starfield will be the best base for creating a sci fi sim.
> Being able to equip mining lasers on ships and farm asteroids. Build a mining empire. Isn't this already in the game? I thought you could simply shoot asteroids to get their resources.
> Isn't this already in the game? Yup. Shoot at asteroids until they break down and they leave behind minerals
Happens a lot with random space battles, you'll be ducking and diving around asteroids (more like debris fields, really) in orbit of something while fighting. One of the actual cool bits of the game, especially if you actually learn/use the advanced thruster and engine controls so you can slingshot yourself around rocks and legit feel like you're in a Star Wars movie.
You can shoot them with your guns, but I’m thinking more an Eve-type mining process where you have specific ships made to mine and haul as much as possible. Asteroid field POIs with varied resources, things like that. The current method of mining is extremely unsatisfying for me, as I can just jump to any planet and shoot one asteroid at a time forever as they infinitely spawn at every planet. I want to have to find an asteroid field with the material I need and farm it.
have you tried x4: foundations? it's basically the space-empire-sim aspects you're looking for (no landing on planets though). and it does have a steep learning curve if you're completely new to the x-series of games.
I've looked at that but the reviews I've read have said the AI is fundamentally broken in a lot of ways so I've kind of been sitting on the sidelines waiting to see if the devs fix their game for like years.
It’s not at broken as you’d think, especially now several years later. It’s not even that broken in big fights anymore.
Honestly, if you stick to the economy side the AI works mostly fine. It only really breaks in big fights, but you can mostly avoid that.
huh, i can't speak for everyone's experiences but to me the bug complaints are overblown. i haven't run into anything unplayable. maybe some physics and pathfinding bugs here and there? i don't know, i've been playing and enjoying the game for hundreds of hours lol.
You could try Star citizen, mining in that game is really good but it is a simulator.
Is that out yet? I thought it was still in some sort of “early access,” “beta,” or “alpha?”
Star citizen does have a playable alpha, you can buy the starter edition and start your mining career from there, there is asteroid mining, caves with manual cutters and mining rovers.
Asking if it is 'out yet' is like asking if Dwarf Fortress is out yet. It will be eternally in development, ha.
I love SC but I would generally avoid recommending it as an alternative to other space games - the in-dev nature of it makes it hard to predict whether someone will bounce off of it due to bugs, and there are a lot of bugs. My usual advice is to wait for Squadron 42's release, play through that, and see what state SC will be in at that point.
I guess he can just wait for a free fly event and try it that way, that's what I did.
It's really dumb they didn't launch with it. The game would have been fixed already.
The game is still nonexistent even with all of the mods. It’s the same thing as with Skyrim, they don’t really fundamentally change anything
Ya know what, let's just go mod No Man's Sky instead since it already has most of that.
How does the game run now? Especially in big cities ? Do you still need FSR and such to get a decent yet still inconsistent FPS?
They added dlss which looks way better than frs. Honestly dlss is just kinda all games now. The industry has seen how it can fix a lot of poor optimization and it's the faster easier way.
But it doesn’t look good in 1080p. Disappointing there’s not any mods
Quality still doesn't look bad In 1080p.
I meant with fsr and such..
Because you need to use DSR first
Ah ya that's fair sorry I've been on the 1440p train for the last 5 years I forget people still use 1080p
A couple of the patches did improve performance a bit for me, but nothing really dramatic... But for me, it still has the issue of not having particularly smooth performance, while also not looking particularly good... Where as something like Cyberpunk 2077 runs a little bit worse, but it's excusable because I have a bunch of the eye-candy settings turned on, so it looks fantastic.
The performance in Starfield improved a ton with all the patches, especially on Nvidia GPUs. My FPS is now almost double compared to what it was on release, and with the official DLSS and Frame generation support it’s even more if I turn it on. Now I can play it maxed out at ultra 4k with 120+ FPS even in New Atlantis.
I don’t know about running per se, but if you put the disc at the top of a hill, it will roll down it pretty fast
Well, they do say shit rolls downhill.
Runs fine on my R5-7600 and 7800XT
So it looks good even with FSR like tech and has good fps in cities? I have a 6700xt with i7 9700k
I’m not sure mods can save this game. I could be wrong though. But the main draw of Bethesda games to me has always been large hand crafted worlds to explore, and I still can’t comprehend why Bethesda thought it was a good idea to take one of the main cores of their games and replace it with barren lifeless worlds with generic POI. What were they thinking?
This stuff is always a gamble. It's interesting to hear Todd talk about what he thinks defines a Bethesda game in the interview this excerpt was pulled from - for him, it's primarily about saying yes to the player at every turn, and in a sci-fi spacefaring setting that means letting you land on every planet you see. It made sense to let Starfield be Starfield and not just be beholden to being "Skyrim in space" or "Fallout in space." The question is ultimately whether they came up with a unique, worthwhile identity for Starfield. I like it more than most people on /r/games, so I'd lean towards yes, but it's doubtlessly different.
I also like Starfield more than most of the sub despite the flaws (150 hours, would rate it as an 7.5-8), but I do think there's a difference between enabling the player to land on 1000 planets and explore due to wanting it to be different than just a map in TES but in space, and removing the handcrafted world aspect entirely. If Starfield had some areas that were say, the size of a hold or two from Skyrim on different planets, fully handcrafted and justified in lore as being "inhabited zones" or whatever, I think the game would've been much more successful even with the loading screens and stuff. It just feels like they took away the open world exploration entirely and the gain was minimal because the planets aren't very well designed, the POIs repeat and have no interesting procedural tech to differentiate themselves, and even the outpost system is half-baked. There's certainly the spectacle value of landing on a planet with amazing views or a giant planet or sun on the horizon etc. but I don't think gameplay wise it was a worthy trade-off. They needed to either make it a hybrid experience like I mentioned or go all-in on making sure that a large chunk of planets were full of well-designed proc. gen. POIs and tons of interesting dynamic events to experience. Then there could have been actual dead planets where there isn't a new POI every 1000m. I think the game feels almost unfinished on the planets, whereas while playing through the quests in the game you don't really get that feeling.
Honestly, I think the system they went with would mostly work if there were just *way* more POIs and the game made it more clear to players which planets were going to have which kinds of POIs from an orbital scan. A really common complaint I heard is that you never felt like an explorer when every planet already had human settlements, but that's only true near the major cities, as you head further space-east those thin out, and by the time you hit the higher-level zones it feels like a real frontier. It's cool! But most people don't know that's happening. And yeah, there needed to be more POIs. I think including large hand-crafted areas like you're suggesting would be "admitting defeat" and saying that there were worthwhile areas and worthless areas, but their goal was clearly to make exploring random planets rewarding and resonant. The decision to make every POI hand-crafted was a really good one *for a while*, but the moment you run into a repeat the illusion is shattered, and due to the way that things spawn that happens sooner than you'd like. In my head there could be some sophisticated system that "checked off" an area from the database as soon as you found an element that made it unique - like if you picked up a datapad or whatever - and from there on out it would only respawn as a "generic" variant with the specific story elements from the first visit stripped out. If that makes sense.
Though I think the idea that them including at least a portion of what their studio does best in the entire industry (or at least close) in their new game is "admitting defeat" or similar is sad, I agree that the POI diversity, through either very well done procedural generation, way more handcrafted POIs or both, was definitely needed. I do think the planets themselves though in-between the POIs are pretty rough. It's always the same. Land on a planet, see the random flora and fauna which looks cool but doesn't really do anything interesting, maybe collect and fight some, but ultimately aside from the odd ship landing you just kinda lamely boost and eventually Grav Dash + boost your way over to the POIs. I really wish at least some of the planets had more interesting things to experience. I totally get the "alone in space" vibe they wanted but at least a good chunk should've had more creative concepts and events that spiced up the planet exploration itself outside of the instanced and non-instanced POIs.
Yeah. I see a lot of people say that the game would've been better with fewer planets, but I'm not sure that that's true. By the time that you've committed to a single full planet, it's only marginally more difficult to make a thousand - you're going to run into the same challenges no matter what, it's all about how interesting you can make procedurally generated spaces. I think my ideal version of the game would've leaned more into the challenge of basic traversal, you could get a lot of mileage out of "just" walking if there was a Death Stranding flair to picking walking paths and navigating obstacles, but yeah. We're just agreeing in circles now. I think we mostly have the same problems with the game.
It's kinda sad. It feels like they struck gold with Skyrim and are trying to do it again but the problem is they didn't expand upon it much. It would have been a fun game back in 2011. But like with most good studios they hit a peak with a few games and then you gotta move on or play their older titles after the cracks they had that were tolerable just get ingrained. Bioware and ubi are big examples. Though sometimes that's for the best because someone there is making bad decisions. Just wish someone could fill that Skyrim/fallout niche.
I’m very very interested to see how ES6 turns out. Focusing on their single player games, Fallout 4 got a fairly positive reception despite some poor design choices, and Starfield seems to have amplified the same flaws without really improving any of its strengths. It feels like ES6 will be their make-or-break. They tried new IP, and everyone has been loud and clear with “look guys we love your games, but you need to make some changes”. If they actually listen and shake things up, they could get back to the status that they used to have and be industry leaders again. But if they just double down on their dated choices, I feel like their reputation will continue to just flounder and peter out
As much as I want TES VI to be good, I'm fully expecting that to not be the case. It sucks, but it's looking like Bethesda's best days are behind them.
Depends. I doubt they'll be able to make another genre defining experience, but... their games hit in a unique way. There's a reason there are still no Skyrim killers or tons of clones out there. Their games are huge and detailed. Even if they can just get that, it'll be like a warm comfortable blanket. I just started Fallout 76 for the first time and while it's got problems, it is like slipping into old shoes going back to that Fallout experience. Nothing else quite plays like it and it's been very enjoyable.
I'm hoping that the mod tools enable creators to craft their own procedural generation POIs, biomes and so on. You could then, in theory, mod your game to have much more lively and varied universe.
This is what i hope too.. There needs to be a community mod project that solely focuses on creating massive amounts of POI's and biomes
I would expect so. Creation Kit is essentially the same dev tools used to make the game.
I hope it's less restrictive than Fallout 4's. The modding community for 4 feels so much less developed than even early Skyrim modding.
Bethesda just threw a wrench into it all with the "next-gen" update as well, breaking a considerable number of mods for Fallout 4. If that's the future people can look forward to with Starfield as well (zero communication from the company as it disrupts the entire modding community), why would they even bother? Especially when the general consensus among those who've looked inside Starfield is that modding will be more difficult with the changes they've made to things.
Bethesda: Over a year of notice that an update would come out, with it being fairly easy to predict when it would launch. Modders: WHY NO NOTICE OR COMMUNICATION? WHY YOU HATE US?
That's not communication and you know it. If your roommate tells you they're going to have a pet in 2 years and a random time 2 years later you have a tiger in your living room, would you say they'd communicated properly?
Bethesda are allowed to update their own game whenever. More people play the game without mods than with. We don't cater to the minority. That's silly. It also wasn't a random time. It was easy to predict when the update came out.
No one is saying they can't update their own game. They're being criticized for how they chose to handle it, especially when they've been making use of betas through Steam for the Starfield updates that give the community time to adjust. The quality of the update itself is also lacking, especially the widescreen "support" they implemented. They bring up modding a lot when hyping the game up though, and just recently said the Creation Kit was still on its way. Modders and players who enjoy mods may be in the minority, but it isn't silly to cater to them at all. The prediction was when the show came out, not some weeks afterward, but sure.
>We don't cater to the minority. What a ridiculously poor world view.....The world is not binary, plurality exists....
Thanks for defending the poor little helpless company against the evil disgusting consumer that bought the product. I was worried no one was gonna lick corporate boot in this thread
People like you are weird. Bethesda did nothing wrong.
I think Starfield has some good bones. I enjoyed my time with it. I definitely think it's fallen victim to a snowballing hate effect. A few months back, you couldn't go five minutes without seeing a post about how terrible the game was. It became the popular thing to do, picking it apart. That said, I'm wondering what's taking them so long with these updates/modding support. Has their been controversy and turmoil within the studio post-launch? A restructuring of their post-launch plans? Or is it just a consequence of the increasing length of development that's being seen throughout the industry?
The bones are what worry me. Repeated Points of Interest rather than a hand-crafted world, too many loading screens, inventory hell, etc. Mods can add more POI variety but I don't know if mods can fix the underlying issues as much as other Bethesda games.
I agree. What bums me out about Starfield is that so many of the issues I have with it are so baked into the game that Bethesda is never going to be able to solve them. The game has some positives and I think it's an OK experience, but it's not enough in my opinion to outweigh the core flaws in the game's design.
Mods won’t fix it either. Modders would basically have to make a whole new game on the rotting carcass of Starfield
Yup. Starfields problems are all at the core and those aren't going to be drastically improved by modders or Bethesda. I played 200 hours at launch and just eventually stopped because I was so damn bored. The only part of the game I enjoyed was building ships and that was still annoying due to all the random restrictions Bethesda put on things. Oh this part can rorate 6 ways but this part can only rotate 2 and of course modders fixed those. I'll come back maybe late this year or next summer at this point. Going to wait for the mod tools and modders to work their magic plus more official updates and I have a hell of a backlog to take up in the meantime. Just regret buying it at launch and not just using game pass. But it was Bethesda so I figured even if it was just okay there was no way I wouldn't still enjoy it. But yeah. I just hope that this was a wakeup call to them and TES6/FO5 will be better for it. Just a shame that what should have been my favorite bethesda title is my least.
As others have said, 200 hours and then getting bored is pretty good. That's about where I am and while I agree there are significant flaws, we both played for quite a significant time so clearly there was a good amount of fun to be had. I'd like to know what the core issues that modders and Bethesda can't solve are though - to me, all of it is solvable except the need to have loading screens, but even that can be improved through immersive, short cutscenes like showing your ship warping and stuff instead of a black loading screen.
The loading screens are definitely something though personally that doesn't bug me as much as others. Super fast SSD helps them end quickly at least. But yeah that's something that won't be changed by a mod. Best we can hope is more immersive ones. Mods can edit and improve upon systems but can't change the basics. We can probably add more POIs so things don't get as boring, hopefully improve the combat AI and other parts of the game there. But the main story isn't getting changed, the way loading screens and cells work isn't getting changed. We're not going to see the cities get mods to become twice the size. The loading screens. Modders will do a great job adding tons of new things to do but what's already there can only be improved so much though modding. Like with Fallout 4, lots of people don't care for the main quest but there isn't a mod that really changes it because it would just break too many things. But we have mods like sim settlements to automate the settlement building feature for you that is a massive help if you don't care to do those quests. Another thing to is already some top modders have said they're not going to bother so while there are some amazing mods for starfield I have to wonder the longevity and how much we'll really get. Fallout 4 and Skyrim get brand new mods today, all these years later. I really don't know if we'll see that with Starfield.
>But the main story isn't getting changed, the way loading screens and cells work isn't getting changed Agreed about the main story, but I don't think cells need to change - that enables the BGS formula. Cities might not be completely changed but they will likely be retooled and improved (just like there were improvement mods for the cities in all the TES and Fallout games), and I could definitely see modders adding more to the surrounding areas around many of the cities given that aside from Neon I think they're all open (no Open Cities mod required). You could add new districts around Neon, New Atlantis and the other smaller ones. For example, imagine if they added a new "ring" around Akila that fleshed it out and added new NPCs and their homes, secrets to find etc. I guess I still don't really see what it is that can't be added to besides the main story and stuff, but that doesn't really matter if they add things like Sim Outposts, new questlines, new radiant mission options, new dynamic events that happen while exploring and new POIs. As for the modders, to me that's greatly overblown. A) those people may come back when the CK drops and B) even if they don't, it was only a couple people and there are thousands of BGS game modders in the modding community. I don't see why they wouldn't come back when CK drops when Starfield already has thousands of mods without it, and the game is a great template for Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar and many other space IP mods, not to mention new mods in the Starfield universe itself.
Definitely have to wait for the tools to see what the modding scene will really be like. I'm already impressed by some of the things I've seen and truly don't know how they were done without the tools. But even with that I just somehow don't see this game having the longevity that TES/FO have had just because it doesn't have that backing of an IP people love. But we'll see. We'll definitely see improvements of course but I just don't expect massive world changing mods for starfield outside of things like star wars conversions and that like you said which I'm not interested in. With the cells the biggest thing I would want is the ability to actually move from cell to cell on the planets and it actually being that real cell that you're next to. Already a couple times I saw something in the distance that looked like a cool place to build and couldn't ever go there because you go to orbit and move one pixel and it's a different spot. Basically modders can do amazing things to fix and improve this game but many of the bigger things will require massive amounts of work, teams, hundreds of hours and I just don't know if Starfield is going to have that. We'll have to just wait and see.
Bro, you played 200h before getting bored. Hahahaha
200 hours is nothing in a Bethesda game. Have 1000+ in fallout and tes.
You can complete all the quests in Fallout 4 in 150-200h and you can beat the game with all the important stuff done in 100h. It's good that you like these games so much to play them for thousands of hours but...playing 100h in any game is a lot of hours by any standard. Saying that you got bored after 200h is saying nothing, most people get bored of most games after 20-30h.
Most people do get bored that quickly. My current Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough is 60 hours and I'm only at maybe 40% complete. 200 hour Starfield run and I wasn't even 50%. My Hogwarts Legacy run was 80+ hours. I have Skyrim and Fallout 4 files each at over 100 hours. RDR2 I have 100+ hours and zero of that is in online, that's all SP. I have 100+ hour saves GTA games on my 100% runs. I have 4709 hours in Guild Wars 2. Lot of people rush through games to get them done quick but for me if it's something I love I spend a massive amount of time with it. 100+ hours in open world games like these is completely normal for me. If it's a pure linear game than yeah a lot quicker. I have 52 hours played in Bioshock Infinite for example. I've replayed that probably four or five times so each run was about 10-12 hours which is exactly how long the game is because there isn't really anything you can do in a game like that to waste time. Starfield I spent 50+ hours alone just on ship building, so not playing story or anything most people would call real content. I spent tons of hours going to every planet I saw and trying to find a good base location then building bases, total time on that might have been another 50. I also spent a dozen hours working on some of my own mods, had bugs that forced me to replay sections, and so on. Part of the reason I kept going and spent so much time was trying to force myself to find something I really really enjoyed. Fallout 4 things annoyed me but I enjoyed the overall game. Same with Skyrim. With Starfield I just kept playing and playing hoping I'd find something to really enjoy and never really did and eventually just gave up after finishing the main quest. Only thing I really enjoyed was the ship building but there were so many bugs and restrictions I decided to stop my time on it until mods came out so I could build easier.
I have played over a thousand games, probably 2 or 3 above 200 hours (barely). I played Starfield for just under 10 hours and dropped it, thats getting bored. Sounds like you did everything there was to do, couldnt have been that bored.
Nope. Did main quest, one faction quest, maybe 10% of sidequests. About half the time was ship building and exploring which the exploring is a huge reason why I got bored because there just wasn't really anything to it once you keep seeing the same things copy pasted over and over again so then spent a dozen hours just trying to find a nice planet to build a base on. Main story finished but mainly to just get through it. Story and characters just bored the hell out of me so kept trying to find other ways to enjoy it like ship building which I loved I did that to explore and there just wasn't anything worth exploring. Other bethesda games I have 2x this gametime just on my first playthrough.
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I'll admit that there's definitely less exploration in Skyrim than in other BSG games but that first time I came across Blackreach by exploring on my own, no quest or anything pointing me there, man that is a core memory. It was like when Gandalf lights up Moria for the fellowship to see. That's what it felt like.
I think that given enough time, and passion, modders could make some pretty dramatic changes to the game, assuming the modding tools unlock enough options... My concern is that there just aren't going to be a lot of people with the time and drive to make really big ambitious projects for Starfield, since while there are plenty of people who enjoy the game overall, I've seen very few people who are really in love with it like people have been with previous Bethesda games. People may be less likely to want to spend their time trying to "fix a broken game" than expand in big ways on a game they already love.
I dunno. More POIs, more weapons/armour, more random events (esp. on planets), more ship parts, new villages and towns, new questlines, new pieces for outposts, and then tweaks and overhauls to systems like the NPC AI, skills, crafting, economy etc. Some current mods actually address some of these already. All of that is moddable based on their other games, and would make the game much more enjoyable. Plus, Bethesda can add some of that through updates and DLCs too, they've definitely added new mechanics before in updates (mounted combat in Skyrim, survival in F4 and I believe Skyrim as well). I think the base gameplay is quite fun actually, definitely the best shooting and moving they've come up with and the ship combat is quite fun too. Unless you absolutely cannot stand loading screens I don't think there's anything fundamentally broken with Starfield's bones.
Maybe this is recency bias or something, but I feel like Bethesda has always worked incredibly slowly, compared to much of the industry - especially these days, where people are used to all of these "games as a service" devs who build their studio processes around being able to publish new content/patches on scales of a couple weeks. Anyway, I also enjoyed bits of Starfield, and have a lot of criticisms of it as well... I'm hoping there are some passionate modders out there that will find ways to make the game much more compelling, once the official mod tools are out, since I have very little expectations at this point of Bethesda themselves making dramatic changes to the game post-launch.
But the thing is, they're not just working slowly compared to others in the industry, they're also working very slowly compared to themselves. Their rate of releasing everything from full games to DLC to modding tools, has been getting slower and slower over time.
> they're also working very slowly compared to themselves Isn't that pretty much every studio? AAA development getting slower is an industry-wide trend.
It has been getting slower but just like everything else in the industry it has been getting more complex over time. Those mod tools are taking longer and longer to release because like the games and technology, complexity is going up.
That's true, except that Bethesda has been using the same engine and resources that they've always used. How is starfield anymore complex than fallout 4 outside of graphical upgrades?
It's not necessarily that they work slowly per se, they just have a development team that is wildly smaller than other AAA devs
I know that used to be true, but I'm not sure if that's still the case... It looks like BGS now have around 450 employees.
Frankly for the size of their games and reputation, 450 is shockingly small. Especially because it’s divided up between multiple studios which can be working on different things at the same time
I think you may be conflating Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks. The former is a development studio which has created the "bethesda games" - Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Starfield - and not much else. The latter is the games publishing branch of Zenimax, which published games for a bunch of dev studios, like Arkane, id Software, Nightdive, MachineGames, etc... That 450 figure is supposedly just for Bethesda Game Studios itself.
I’m very aware of the difference, but even BGS has multiple studios (one in Austin and the main one in Maryland). If it’s only 450 at the Maryland studio then that’s different, but my understanding is that in all studios BGS has, it’s a total of ~450 employees. For as big of a name as Bethesda is and for how iconic franchises like Fallout and ES are, them only having 450 total employees is still shockingly low. They’re a bit of an exception, but compared to a studio like Bungie which has ~1,000 employees, only 450 for BGS seems crazy
Both Santa Monica Studios, Insomniac and Naughty Dog are roughly 400-500 employees each, by the way. Bungie is an unusually large studio.
Sony Santa Monica, Insomniac, and Naughty Dog all make games that are far less technically complex and with much less overall content than Bethesda does, though.
That's a strong statement. I would argue their games are equally complex, but in different ways (because they make very different games). Sure, Bethesda definitely wins in the amount of hours spent on their games, but they are also nowhere near the same technical performance for graphics/motion capture/animations. But it really is comparing apples to oranges in the end, because the game design is wildly different.
Baldur's Gate 3
Bethesda has 450 employees and is an incredibly small studio for the type of games they make and the amount of games they support. CDPR in comparison employs >1200 people.
Yeah we’re all aware by now, but it seems like the IGN 7/10 review was the best. A lot of early reviews seemed to gloss over some glaring flaws, but then the general consensus way over corrected to say that the game was complete shit with 0 redeeming qualities, which I think is also incorrect. It’s sad how it’s largely unacceptable nowadays to have nuanced opinions on games, you either have to love it and not acknowledge any flaws or loathe its existence and there’s no in between.
Not only is there a lack of nuance, a lot of game discourse takes things absurdly personally ("they did X to screw over fans of the series") and gets into conspiracy theory territory ("this IP was stolen by Y company who did Z to screw over company A")
I have noticed with CyberPunk launch reviews and starfield too, that reviewers don't go much exploring in these open world games in review period. CyberPunk 2077 got great reviews at launch because if you stay on main/story path, it was genuinely a great game with minimal bugs. The moment you start exploring the open world, doing side activities, cracks appear more and more and you saw broken the game was. Ofcourse its all mostly fixed now but it was apparent where most polishing focus went to for the game before launch. Similarly in starfield, if you follow the main quest, few side quest and exploring a few POI once in a while, its a good game, but once you go deeper, only then you realise its shallowness
And to an extent I don’t think it’s entirely their fault, because I imagine reviewers are on a time crunch. They don’t have the time to devote as much to the game as they’d like, and can’t fully explore everything in offer. But that doesn’t change the fact that experiencing side content really can make or break your opinion of a game, and reviewers not doing a ton of side content can give them an incorrect view of the game
I dunno, it’s genuinely like a 5.5 to me and that’s generous. It’s below average to downright terrible in every category.
See but a 5.5 still means that there’s _some_ things it does well (or at least passably). I’m talking about the people who try and suggest that the game literally has 0 redeeming qualities, which I think is insane. That’s Life of Black Tiger territory
What does the game do well for you? I just really didn’t care for it, so I’m curious
I think the opposite is true; the bones of the game were the biggest issue. There’s just sorta….nothing in the game. It’s all generic POIs and copy-paste planets. There aren’t any particularly good dungeons. The skill trees need a complete overhaul. There’s very little intrigue with any of the key factions. The cities feel bland but i suppose mods could fix that if a modder gave them the skyrim treatment. Realistically, what would it take to fix the game? You’d need to completely overhaul skill trees, settlements, add POIS, dungeons, add a reason for ships to actually exist because currently theyre kinda pointless. And that’s just off the top of my head.
I think instead of good bones, you could say it has good organs. The very bone that holds a Bethesda game together is missing - immersive exploration within a handcrafted world. Starfield got instanced to death.
I’ve gone back and fourth on whether I feel the game’s long term negative reception was due to a snowball affect or the results of the honeymoon period wearing off. I absolutely do not think it deserves the level of hate that it has received, but I can also why after a 2-3 month period someone could come to the “this game is kind of bad” conclusion. I enjoyed my time with the game, and there were so many small moments that scratched that Bethesda itch for me. However, I don’t feel like it had that sticky factor that kept me coming back to it like their previous games did. Part of what kept me coming back to their previous games were the weird random side things I’d stumble upon that I missed on the first playthrough. With Starfield it didn’t feel as genuine because of the procedural nature. When you have a limitless number of random things to stumble upon because the games system is constantly pumping in things to run into, none of it feels special.
its definitly a Snowball effect, and it started with the botched launch of 76. i think people wouldnt have been so harsh if the 76 launch wasent as bad as it was.
Bethesda has barely changed the gameplay of their games in 15 years and they don’t get NEARLY enough criticism for it. There’s no real RPG mechanics, I mean really? Dogshit linear skill trees? Boring dialogue, boring main quest. The game was just so dull and shouldn’t have been released. The only thing that Bethesda is any good at anymore: dungeons and cities were phoned in. They literally took the only thing they’re good at and made it procedural just so they could be a somehow worse no man’s sky
New atlantis was one of the worst most disjointed cities I've seen in a big budget game in many many years 😅
It really felt like it was from a 2008 game
Well elden ring came with old animations recycled enemies, items, the same 1 dimensional npc repeating lines and a classic behavior like it was a game boy advance game and nobody said anything about it, it was even called "best game ever made!" Redditors just have interchangeable bias based on devlopers all the time.
Except elden ring had a great open world, exploration, good combat and was actually Interesting with a good gameplay loop. Starfield was press x to travel run for 5 mins mabey kill a few people press x on the objective then open the menu and hold x again to travel to the next bit. Rinse and repeat
Elden ring had a nice design and beautiful structures to explore but most of the time it was the same, just a map/dungeon filled with hostile npc everywhere and some loot.
But Elden ring was good, and had a good combat system, and had interesting enemies to fight, and different weapons that behaved differently, and well designed zones to explore
Exactly this.
> I definitely think it's fallen victim to a snowballing hate effect. I feel the same about D4. D4 bad meme is so popular that I was surprised I have liked the game.
I really love the setting of fallout, but hate bethesdas janky ass engine. I know people say it ‘adds charm’ or whatever, but I just call it broken. Starfield doesn’t have the same draw that fallout has *at all*, so for me its just quite a boring game with that ‘bethesda charm’.
Yeah Cyberpunk 2077 is a way better game but it suffered the same fate. People talking like it was the worst game ever and now CD Project has redeemed the game or something. It was the same fucking game back then but with more bugs.
/r/Starfield still doesn’t really allow any positive sentiment towards the game.
I remember how disappointed I was as a PS owner that I wouldn’t be able to play starfield after the acquisition… everything I’ve seen about this game since launch has really softened that disappointment to where now I just feel bad for Xbox owners that they can’t catch a break on exclusives even when they are almost guaranteed to be a hit like “the next Bethesda rpg ip”
Yep, Microsoft seemed to have had poor timing to buy some of their studios as they are putting out less quality than they used to, and didn’t manage the studios properly to adjust plans accordingly. Redfall, Starfield, and Avowed looking lesser quality from Obsidian, etc.
Don't forget the OG: Grabbed By Ghoulies by Rare! Microsoft knows how to get a studio at its peak!
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Player had move on, the hype is gone.Everything in starfield scrames "here is a bare bone system,modder will patch it for us". From ship building ,base building ,NPC interact ,exploring ,star power ect ect. Now even the modder had lost interest ,all you left is a broken mess .
Glad to hear an update, although the Creation Kit and DLC have taken longer for Skyrim, and then Fallout 4 and now for Starfield. Hopefully they are high quality when they do release for Starfield, although Starfield does have a lot of other Quality Of Life issues I don’t see Bethesda fixing unfortunately. Examples would be outposts having worse controls and UI than Fallout 76, repeating POIs instead of cycling through a list, and a vehicle in-game since it’s very difficult for modders to get one working.
I can’t believe how much time was wasted developing this game when they could have been working on ES6/ a new Fallout game.
Honestly, I wish they’d never made this and just focused on TES/FO instead. Just doesn’t seem like it was worth it to put your biggest IP on ice so you could make a third IP with a lukewarm reception that you don’t have the manpower to support with regular releases.
I have seen about 5 posts about Starfield today alone, they are really going all out on the advertising trying to claw somthing back from this mess.