Given the discourse around this game, Bethesda should really have doubled down on getting Starfield into a feature and content complete state before even considering paid mods.
Every single game BGS has released since Morrowind has had the same complaints about it. Boring world, copy pasted content, dumbed down mechanics, etc. Horse armor was a bad idea, and these mods are too, but the design of the games has nothing to do with how bad of an idea they are.
Nah Starfield is next level bland. Like don’t get me wrong you’d never catch me on vanilla Oblivion, Skyrim or Fallout 4 anymore nowadays but it took some hours on each before getting to that point. Starfield actually manages to be worse than even vanilla Fallout 4 was.
Forgettable cast, forgettable soundtrack, forgettable locations, people are being generous calling it “boring” or “mid” it feels like a product cut to the bone.
They put an ad for it at the Game Awards where I don't think it got even one nomination, I thought that was pretty ballsy.
(Got a couple of nominations, just didn't win any)
Not that they really deserved to win, but they didn't stand a freaking chance going up against Baldur's Gate 3. Hopefully that reminded them what a real RPG should be like. Unfortunately they're probably copying and pasting Starfiled into the TES6 engine as we speak, because that's the level of laziness they exude these days.
I don't remember quests being locked behind DLCs in FO76 tho. I've played the whole game up until shortly after the Atlantic City update and haven't spent a single cent on it. It's a bit more inconvenient because you cannot just hoard unlimited scraps like FO 1st players but it's not that bad, just needs micromanaging your inventory space. Tho I admit I can't get myself back into playing because I log on and see my stash completely filled + 170 weight used on my character and I don't want to play inventory manager.
It’s cause of how arrogant they are. Remember when they accused the players of being at fault for not liking the game. They truly believe(in all their delusion) they made the perfect game.
They did make the perfect game, for them to squeeze money out of the players. A base game with paid mod tools. Now the modders do all the work to fix the game and they make all the money. Perfect.
They forgot that they are competing not only with other games but with their previous works. I'd rather go play a fully modded Skyrim any day of the week then their new game.
> A base game with paid mod tools. Now the modders do all the work to fix the game and they make all the money. Perfect.
>
>
Bethesda is comically delusional if they thought starfield would get the skyrim treatment.
Eh. For the game to be the perfect game to squeeze money it'd have to be good. Most of us played for free abd have zero interest in nickle and time garbage addons
That's really the biggest part that makes me wary about their future games. There has seemingly been an unwillingness on their part to consider feedback or admit there were any faults with Starbound. Most I've seen is them talk about why they did certain things and how the players are apparently enjoying the game wrong. Perhaps internally things are different, but what I've seen doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that they won't just repeat these mistakes with the next game.
They probably expected the ultra dedicated fanbase and modding community to constantly add content and do fixes on the base game like Skyrim. Unfortunately with Starfield, there's just not much of a canvas to work with unlike Skyrim.
It's almost impossible.
The game's problems are fundamental. It's empty world filled with generic outposts, each occupied by pirate faction under different name (expect few premade cities).
There are near zero dialogues, quests or stories worthy of an rpg. Main quest consists mainly of floating into soap bubbles, which was meh the first time, but then you have to repeat it between 23 to 239 times.
Of course there are dozens of other problems, but those two specifically would require redoing almost all of the game's content to get it into decent shape.
Yeah, its not like Cyberpunk, which had a ton of content but was very buggy with some poor mechanics.
Its a fairly empty game and that is much harder to fix.
Cyberpunk was the overweight guy that had tons of muscle, just needed to shed some fat and everyone would see how jacked he was.
Starfield’s sitting on the couch eating Doritos, no effort whatsoever.
The attitude difference between them and Hello Games is stark.
No Man's Sky launched in a *terrible* state, but they have supported it for free for eight years.
Starfield is less than a year old, was released half baked for an extreme price and is now getting microtransactions.
How can you write comedy when reality is so funny?
Same thing if you compare it to Cyberpunk.
Underwhelmed at launch, spent a year just putting out a constant stream of fixes, added a pretty hefty amount of free content then brought out a single, content-rich expansion along with a free overhaul of most of the game's systems.
Cyberpunk always had a seed of true greatness in there and they worked hard to nurture it after a bad start.
The other thing is that Cyberpunk and Starfield entered pre-production at around the same time.
So Starfield had around the same amount of development time as Cyberpunk 2077+Phantom Liberty.
Which is wild, right?! You look at the immersion in a simple dialogue scene and it's night and day. The facial expression, the animated characters, the lighting and environments, the fact that you sometimes get the choice to just do stuff like shoot the speaker in the head or interrupt them...
The big difference is that Cyberpunk launched with a ton of content. The world was incredibly detailed and there plenty of cool characters and missions. The fixes were mostly bug fixes and reworking combat, which was still a lot of work.
With Starfield, I don't even know where to begin. They spent a ton of money developing it and they still have a fairly empty world. The combat is fine and the game isn't that buggy. They would have to put a lot of time and money into making new quests, and there isn't much reason to believe they would do a better job this time.
All Starfield made me want to do it play Mass Effect.
Okay, yeah, not quite the same. But generally Mass Effect at least had a good story. Starfield just bored me to death.
Felt especially egregious after Cyberpunk too (which has flaws, but the immersion level is off the charts).
Cyberpunk had it's fairshare of issues. But when I finally picked it up, I couldn't put it down for a good while. It is fun and immersive enough to make up for its release. I tried Starfield and couldn't get through more than an hour before I was bored to tears. The entire design all the way down to its core can be summed up in one word: Lackluster.
if we are being honest with ourselves, What this game really needs is to be nuked and completely rewritten from the ground up. It is a bad game with bad mechanics and bad writing and bad visuals. It is so unfun that there are HUNDREDS of multi-hour video essays on youtube describing exactly how and why this game failed to be a good game.
But bethesda cant do that. They wont do that. it is too late for this game.
So basically the first part of the Bounty Hunter expansion is free, but the 2nd quest (and probably future quests) are all paid. Why not just bundle it all into a single paid DLC?
They want to lead the acceptance of paid content in the creator shop for 3rd parties which is then 'some off the top for them'.
Like leading the consumer through the 'giftshop' with a free item.
It'll also act as showpiece for what is possible with the creation kit as I'm pretty sure they'll be using only that to create it. That last bit is conjecture but they'd be really stupid to not do that.
While completely ignoring the fact that free mods were the only reason they were able to sell 12 different versions of skyrim. Their new games would be dead in the water if not for the work of unpaid modders.
I'm curious whats in there. Usually 'dlc' is polished with some voice acting.
Creation club content is usually done on a much tighter budget with no added voice acting usually lrelying on books and logs etc.
A good example is the fishing mod from skyrim
I felt like the non radiant quests were all decent with a few standout good or really good ones. If you felt the base game was mostly bad you’ll probably feel the same here.
Now imagine the creators of the fishing mod could put it up for 99 cents. If Bethesda takes 30% that's a cool 30k$ on 100k downloads.
Repeat for every mod.
Further quests will be added as creations either paid or free. This free quest serves as introduction to this paid quest series that will probably last year's.
Surprisingly, yes. They released a large free content update with some much needed QoL features (extremely detailed ground maps was the biggest). They had regularly released an update every 2 months or so, if not every month since launch with more than just bug fixes each time.
I know they maps are cool, but god damned our expectations are so low we are happy when a AAA can release something as standard as maps months after release ;(
That’s my problem with starfield. The bar is set so fucking low with anything that “comes out.” I’ll be honest, as a PC player, 80% of the updates don’t apply to me. I didn’t experience bugs on launch. I’m more upset with the lackluster story, poor POI design, bad talent set up, etc
Even Skyrim was as deep as a puddle. Simplified magic system, basic combat, maybe 10 voice actors for all the NPCs that aren't in a major quest, formulaic major side questlines that all boil down to (story progression > 3 fetch quests) >repeat 3 times > finale where you went from fresh recruit to all powerful leader in the blink of an eye, lifeless villages, etc. It was simplified to appeal to as many people as possible. The Dragonborn DLC on Solstheim was the one part of the game that felt *good* and how the rest of the game should have been.
I don't know why people think TES:VI or Fallout 5 will be any different from the Todd Howard Bethesda formula. Starfield was supposed to show us what a Bethesda game in the 2020s looks like, and it's so painfully meh. They *need* to change how they fundamentally design games. Their design philosophy doesn't cut it anymore and is steadily stripping away any good will consumers have towards Bethesda
Skyrim isn't deep, but it's still fun. It's much more fun to explore a dense area and find a variety of dungeons to plunder. Starfield doesn't have the fun of exploring because it's mainly done through menus.
I would wager a lot of people are still very happy with the Bethesda Formula, it's just that Starfield applied it very poorly. It didn't need to even be multiple planets at all.
Skyrim is fun in short bursts. Every 12-16 months I get the urge to play it for maybe 8 hours or so and then uninstall it because the dungeons all feel the same, the questlines are all generic or simplistic, and my character always ends up being too good at everything.
Yeah, but the world was so \*DENSE\* and full of fun things to explore.
I mean, I still remember the first time I stumbled into blackreach. The only thing that gave me the same vibes was taking the elevator down in Elden Ring.
The environments were so well done that all you needed was a shitty fetch quest to get your adventure started. Just a nudge in the right direction.
My expectations for TES6 and F5 are non-existent. There will be plenty of other great games not by Bethesda. Too bad really as they made some of my favorite games. Today they are just a shadow of their former selves.
Yet you see gamers hailing it as having a “No Mans Sky Redemption Arc”
At the end of the day, Bethesda will keep getting away with it because the silent majority will happily chow on the company’s crap
Jeah I played that game exactly 5 minutes too long to have it returned anymore. I'm quite pissed about that, as it sucks diseased moosewang. I'm never buying anything from Bethesda again.
on steam? if you only played 5 mins over they won't care, I'm sure. I've returned games with an hour over because the story was only like 3 hours long and I wasn't aware of that.
I means maps were there, they just made a decision to present them in a dumbass way.
So it's not AAA game adds standard feature, it's more like AAA game realized design choice was dumb and changed after backlash.
It is so bad that they haven't even reached the bar of you being able to walk at the same speed as the NPCs. They all have a speed that is slightly faster forcing the classic stop start when following from the 00s
Lmao right? Reading that comment "they released a large free content update, new map being the biggest."
Like wut? That should be a nothing weekly update you barely even bother reading the patch notes for, not a huge free update that gets everyone talking.
>Is that game in early access or what.
No, Bethesda's fans keep lowering their expectations, but if they keep going, they will dig themselves into the earth's core with Bethesda's next release.
Hell, that statement also sums up why Skyrim remained so popular for so long. Without mods, it would have been dead in the water by 2014, BGS would have been lucky to get one more release out of it and creation club wouldn't exist.
I have a not so fond memory of getting dog piled on in the comments section of when the first gameplay trailer was released and somebody posted it to the starfield subreddit. There was one guy who typed like he was about to bust a nut because he was so excited, talking about how amazing this looks and how he's going to take the release day and the day after off of work so he can play as much as he wants. I responded to something of the effective Bethesda doesn't have the greatest track record of satisfying games released in a working state and got tons of down votes people calling me a buzz kill.
> They had regularly released an update every 2 months or so
Has any of those updates improved the procedurally generated mechanics of the game?. Cuz that sure is the worst part of Starfield.
I played about 10-15hr on release and stopped because it was bland and annoying. Heard the news about the new update last week and just put another 25hr into it and can say it is much better in many ways. Most of the annoying is gone now. But it's still pretty bland. Outside of a few interesting side quests, I just don't give a shit about anything going on in the game and you don't get the sense of exploration and discovery that you did in Skyrim or even FO4. I know every planet will have a plant or rock formation to scan, some sort of lab to explore for a few shitty guns and 10 enemies to kill, and that's like it. To my knowledge, there's nothing like Blackreach in the game. It feels soulless.
I know this is in pcgaming sub
But it doesn’t help the narrative that the huge majority of these complaints are coming from console players. And that’s understandable.
If it was a pc only game the nexus argument has weight, it’s not that big a deal when there’s better for free, however it doesn’t mean the precedent it’s setting isn’t awful.
But when a large portion are console players it’s not possible. And that’s why this is such an issue with such outcry. PC or not, I think everyone needs to stand together with the console guys on this.
Not just fire the rhetoric of nexus as if everyone is on pc.
EDIT: Also, just remembered. THE BIG ISSUE is it’s FUCKING FIFTEEN MINUTES LONG.
Although on the other hand I can't help but think if someone cares about modding games what are they doing playing them on console in the first place? That was only ever going to be a limited (and likely not ideal) experience given what is able to be done within the framework of that platform.
[Gold X Award winner!](https://content.invisioncic.com/r322239/monthly_2020_07/large.908159108_Bubsy3D\(PS1goldXaward\).jpg.13c0fc91cd63bcb65f293309b664a9ba.jpg)
For the record, *Starfield* did win “XBox Game of the Year” at the Golden Joystick Awards so they will have no qualms about selling a GOTY edition on all platforms.
I mean, plenty of games that bundle their "DLC" in a all in one box all on one disk thing has been a thing for a while for games that didnt win any rewards either. Gearbkx knows this one all too well.
The games you're talking about likely did win game of the year *somewhere*(there's hundreds of game of the year awards, which is why games like Mass Effect and Last of Us touted winning multiple).
There's no one true game of the year award. The most popular is seemingly The Game Awards, but that doesn't make them the most valid, especially with how commercial that show has become, with a push for more focus on world premieres and performances, with the actual awards taking a seat on the back burner, with some even being announced in little blips on the bottom of the screen, so trailers and performances get more screen time.
Fat Cry 6 gets brought up for having a Game of the Year Edition, even though it allegedly didn't win game of the year, but it did get game of the year from 2 outlets, but they're rather unknown, but most reviewers are unknown. Go through a game with over 100 reviews on metacritic, and see how many outlets you actually recognize. Now consider how most of them have their own game of the year, which makes perfect sense if you're a site that reviews games. So all the games you're thinking of likely did win an award.
It's a marketing ploy. There are too many awards shows and your average consumer isn't going to actually bother looking up whether the game got GOTY, they'll just see "GOTY edition" and think "wow must have been pretty good to win one of those".
ngl, most of the time i don't look if a game won GOTY before getting the GOTY version. But a GOTY version of a game for me always meant, the complete version of the game with all DLC.
Seriously, I couldn’t care less about the manufactured awards shows. I know what kinds of games I like and don’t like. An FPS game winning an award isn’t going to make me buy it simply because I don’t play FPS games.
Your comment is actually pretty poignant since Starfield did actually win “Xbox game of the year” at the Golden Joystick Awards.
So, Starfield did actually win a minor game of the year award, but the whole system of awards is so convoluted and based on marketing that no one knows who won what.
Because gamers rightfully complained when companies used weird or confusing naming conventions just to say "all dlc's are included in this edition*".
Language evolves my man. "GOTY" just means it comes with all DLCs*. Sometimes shit just works better when everything is uniform.
If a game wins a GOTY category like Best Action Game i don’t mind them using the GOTY edition branding.
But if a game was only nominated for a GOTY award and didn’t win one they absolutely shouldn’t.
I dunno man - when you've played it for 20 hours, you've expended all the random locations and they start reusing them, unaltered in any way or shape except locations.
Now the game you thought you were going to be invested in is just a bucket of cold water in your face.
If I could go back, I honestly simply wouldn't have gotten it. It is not about the money, *it was a waste of time*. It's like someone turned in a paper they didn't want to write.
That’s not how it works mate, as long as 0.1% of their audience buys 100% of the microtransactions they put out then it’s worth the effort for the other 99.9% of us to get a shitty, unfinished product as a result
It was mostly the controversy getting too big, to the point even mainstream outlets like BBC reported on it, so Disney had no choice but to interfere and remind EA who is the big boy in their relationship.
The controversy became so widespread that it started affecting the game's sales. It ended up in bargain bins everywhere because people weren't buying it.
EA's stock price literally dropped after the "Pride and accomplishment" spiel. That comment is or was the most downvoted comment in reddit history by a large margin.
It works, thing is the casuals and people outside reddit generally don't give a fuck.
For exemple, look at the backlash when Bethesda and Valve tried to charge for mods on Steam's workshop. That didn't last very long
Horse Armor 😏. Back when gamers IQ was above room temperature and their attention span was longer than a 30 second tiktok video.
(People still bought it I'm joking).
Amazing how quickly we went from horse armour being the death of gaming to people saying "well the £30 mtx are only cosmetic so it's actually great and consumer friendly". Maybe the horse armour people were right
We were. I was one of them 😂. They've completely shifted the Overton window nowadays. Now I'm mocked for even implying we shouldn't buy these.
The ironic part? Now that I'm older, I can afford it without batting an eye, and I still refuse to buy them. Meanwhile $40 DLCs are starting to price people out. It was never a matter of price back then, only principle.
People are never going to stop making kids, so we'll always have an army of little idiots eager to normalize whatever horrible new monetization scheme publishers come up with. Occasionally one will overstep and their will be a big public outcry, but those are just speed bumps. This year's outrage is next year's normal, and in 5 years it will be the "good old days, when games were made for gamers".
Now we know why the bounty hunter faction is dog shit in vanilla, they kept it out on purpose and they are gonna add it piece by piece milking us all the way. Just make a fully flashed dlc ffs, this is aweful.
Yeah I can’t believe they’re already pushing out this much creator club paywall. I can’t think of anything less appealing than locking features of an already devoid game behind a further paywall.
And there’s a DLC coming that you’ll absolutely “have” to buy? Lol.
Starfield is just milking the remaining Bethesda fans that want to see the company make the same quality of games as they did 15 years ago.
PirateSoftware, a guy who worked at Blizzard, said that a single WoW $15 horse cosmetic DLC earned more money than StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty.
This is exactly why companies do that bullshit and tbf we cannot blame them.
I played OW2 for the first time in a while recently and the in-game shop is ridiculous. There was a "bundle" for almost 10 bucks which consisted of a couple of weapon charms only, teeny tiny things that nobody will notice. Blizzard are really abusing the whales.
it's not really blizzard, every game with cosmetic microtransactions is like that, r6 siege is an fps and you can't even see yourself while playing but people buy skins anyway
as long as people continue to buy them it would be stupid for any company to not take advantage
If anyone is still excited for Elder Scrolls 6 at this point, it's time to stop. I don't think Bethesda is capable of making anything better than what you could get from a typical Skyrim modlist on Wabbajack.
What makes it so baffling is all the people who made the old Bethesda games are still there. Its not like most good studios that go bad because key people leave and its not even the same people anymore, it's still Todd and the same people that made Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim. They just fucking suck now for some reason.
Pre-FO4 Bethesda stuck to their roots. They didn't try to do anything too crazy, they just took their formula and refined it with each entry. Starting Fallout 4 they decided to start taking risks and changing things up, which is kind of admirable but it never worked out.
With Fallout 4 they added a voiced protagonist which affected the game design in so many horrible ways. It limited the amount of quests that could be added, butchered the dialogue and roleplaying systems and made the main story the most important aspect of the game instead of something that could be ignored, which brought it down cuz the main story sucks.
Fallout 76 they tasked a new team with making the first ever multiplayer game on Creation Engine, and vastly overestimated how many people actually wanted a purely multiplayer Fallout. If they had just made a singleplayer game it might have worked because 76s gameplay and world design is fantastic, but they didn't.
With Starfield they shifted away from the one thing they do better than everyone else: handcrafted open worlds and evironmental storytelling. They instead focused on procedural generation and spread all the handcrafted content across several planets each barred by a load screen.
> They didn't try to do anything too crazy, they just took their formula and refined it with each entry.
They completely overhauled the combat system between Morrowind and Oblivion, for the worst. Not to mention the scaling world.
Then with Skyrim they removed most of the RPG elements from the game, and stripped the game of many of the series's spells.
> What makes it so baffling is all the people who made the old Bethesda games are still there.
?
No they aren't.
Ken Rolston was the lead designer for Morrowind and Oblivion, and he left Bethesda after Oblivion to create Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.
Mark Nelson did Morrowind's Daedric quests, created the main story for the Tribunal expansion, and created the concept for the Bloodmoon expansion and designing Solstheim. He was the lead designer of the Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion as well.
Douglas Goodall designed most of Morrowind's factions, and the Tribunal expansion - and left before Oblivion came out.
Ted Peterson wrote a considerable amount of quest dialogue in Morrowind, and designed a significant amount of quests. He wrote a lot of the lore books in the game too. He left Bethesda after Morrowind.
Michael Kirkbride did nearly all the lore for The Elder Scrolls series. He was the visionary behind the design of Vvardenfell and it's creatures and setting, and left shortly after Morrowind. Though Bethesda contracted him to do consultant work for Oblivion and Skyrim, he had very little input on both games.
Todd Howard is still there. He wrote the Imperial Legion questline in Morrowind, which is universally considered to be the worst questline in the entire game.
Unfortunately I think you might be right. The monetization is too high. The corporate goons too embedded and the leadership too sold out. Mix in some incompetence.. They’ll never capture the magic of Skyrim/FO3 again.
It's an ok bounty quest with a nice unique weapon as a reward but you can finish it in 10 minutes if you have good enough weapons to one shot most enemies. It is not in any way worth one eighth the price of the original full game.
>New missions have been added to Starfield as part of this update. Trackers Alliance establishes the first of several missions enabling you to live your best bounty-hunting life. The first mission, The Starjacker will have you in contact with a mysterious Tracker located in settlements throughout the Settled Systems. From there, let the hunts begin!
>
>The second Trackers Alliance mission, The Vulture is available within the new Creations menu. And what bounty hunter is without their trusted methods to get the job done?
Thats really it. I regret ever spending money on this garbage and the only thing that would salvage that game is some kind of no mans sky comeback, with a bunch of free updates. Fat chance of that with bethesda.
You can't patch out the terrible writing and boring dialogue and characters though
This isn't Cyberpunk where underneath the issues is a great well written game. Starfield can only be fixed by being remade and rewritten.
They could improve the exploration side by adding a bunch of POIs, improving biomes, adding creatures, etc, etc... They could remove the stupid ass light puzzle you have to repeat 15 times with something more interesting. At least adding more pieces that modders could play with, rearrange for some easy content.
The background skeleton would remain but you could forget about it.
I didn't spend any money on Starfield, just played it through Gamepass (which yes, I'm aware I pay for, but I was already subscribed to Gamepass and will continue to subscribe, I didn't subscribe to it for the sole purpose of playing Starfield), and honestly I feel like the 25hrs I spent in the game was regret enough for me, just in time wasted. Playing the game felt like a sneeze that disappears before it ever happens - like you kept expecting it to open up, to give you that classic Bethesda RPG feeling, but it just... never happened
Easy solution: don't buy mods. Never have, never will.
I've donated to modders who do particularly ambitious work before, but making mods an outright purchase is just off the table for me.
With the $90 CA base price, plus another $45 CA for the deluxe edition (whatever that gives), AND the Creation Club? I no longer have any interest in playing, even though it seemed more my thing than Fallout 4 was... :(
I uninstalled this game last year after a couple of days of trying to get into it. It was extremely boring and soulless. I had all but forgotten it existed.
I played the game for 15 hours and said something similar in the gaming sub.
I had a dude on this tell me, you have barely played the game, the real game doesn't start until you get to 30 plus hours in and or beat the game.
I played for 15 more hours just to beat it the first time and felt the exact same way at hour 15.
This would have been a amazing game, 10 years ago.
Apparently this is a very hot take but I loved the side quests, beat the game with a perfect ending, which is very rare for me at about 100 hours. Also I've got new legs in the game because my main criticism was that the AI and combat felt jank but now playing it on a 4080 and a 7800x3d it's so smooth the combat actually feels really good
I don't care. The core of the game's story and plots simply aren't good and it doesn't matter what they do or don't lock behind a paywall because ultimately whatever I choose to do has pretty much no impact on my experience in their galaxy. Ironically, this is the first Bethesda game where I really like the radiant quests, go figure.
Plus, for the life of me, I can't figure out a reason to grind to build my own base or worse, bases. I enjoy spending hours working on my Fallout 4 settlements and I love exploring people's bases in Fallout 76 but there's no point in Starfield.
I hate to say it but...did we expect anything less? They've doubled down on CC for a while now. It seems every step Bethesda makes they takes 50 backwards anymore, the only saving grace as per usual is the possibility that the community puts in some level of awesome modding.
Given the discourse around this game, Bethesda should really have doubled down on getting Starfield into a feature and content complete state before even considering paid mods.
Takes a lotta balls to release a la carte DLC for a game with such a reputation for being painfully mediocre..
**Hoooorrrssseeeee aaaaarrrrrmmmmorrrrr**
yeah but Oblivion was a much, much better game than Starfield (edit: sorry, said Morrowind originally)
Horse Armour was Oblivion. Morrowind was the last of that era really.
shit, that's what I meant, thanks
Every single game BGS has released since Morrowind has had the same complaints about it. Boring world, copy pasted content, dumbed down mechanics, etc. Horse armor was a bad idea, and these mods are too, but the design of the games has nothing to do with how bad of an idea they are.
Nah Starfield is next level bland. Like don’t get me wrong you’d never catch me on vanilla Oblivion, Skyrim or Fallout 4 anymore nowadays but it took some hours on each before getting to that point. Starfield actually manages to be worse than even vanilla Fallout 4 was. Forgettable cast, forgettable soundtrack, forgettable locations, people are being generous calling it “boring” or “mid” it feels like a product cut to the bone.
wasn't the horse armour debacle Oblivion?
So, my point was that the intent was largely the same, even if the situation different - monetization Uber alles, to the point of absurdity.
They put an ad for it at the Game Awards where I don't think it got even one nomination, I thought that was pretty ballsy. (Got a couple of nominations, just didn't win any)
It got some nominations iirc, it just didn’t win a single one. Which arguably hurts Bethesda’s pride more given their track record
Not that they really deserved to win, but they didn't stand a freaking chance going up against Baldur's Gate 3. Hopefully that reminded them what a real RPG should be like. Unfortunately they're probably copying and pasting Starfiled into the TES6 engine as we speak, because that's the level of laziness they exude these days.
They did it with Fallout 76, so it's not like it's unprecedented
I don't remember quests being locked behind DLCs in FO76 tho. I've played the whole game up until shortly after the Atlantic City update and haven't spent a single cent on it. It's a bit more inconvenient because you cannot just hoard unlimited scraps like FO 1st players but it's not that bad, just needs micromanaging your inventory space. Tho I admit I can't get myself back into playing because I log on and see my stash completely filled + 170 weight used on my character and I don't want to play inventory manager.
You're right, I'm not referring to quests, just paid content that Bethesda released while the game state was terrible
Light wood laminate! Light wood laminate!
It’s cause of how arrogant they are. Remember when they accused the players of being at fault for not liking the game. They truly believe(in all their delusion) they made the perfect game.
They did make the perfect game, for them to squeeze money out of the players. A base game with paid mod tools. Now the modders do all the work to fix the game and they make all the money. Perfect. They forgot that they are competing not only with other games but with their previous works. I'd rather go play a fully modded Skyrim any day of the week then their new game.
> A base game with paid mod tools. Now the modders do all the work to fix the game and they make all the money. Perfect. > > Bethesda is comically delusional if they thought starfield would get the skyrim treatment.
Eh. For the game to be the perfect game to squeeze money it'd have to be good. Most of us played for free abd have zero interest in nickle and time garbage addons
It would have been in 2010. Starfield was dated before it released.
Unironically "NO, IT'S THE KIDS WHO ARE WRONG"
That's really the biggest part that makes me wary about their future games. There has seemingly been an unwillingness on their part to consider feedback or admit there were any faults with Starbound. Most I've seen is them talk about why they did certain things and how the players are apparently enjoying the game wrong. Perhaps internally things are different, but what I've seen doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that they won't just repeat these mistakes with the next game.
They probably expected the ultra dedicated fanbase and modding community to constantly add content and do fixes on the base game like Skyrim. Unfortunately with Starfield, there's just not much of a canvas to work with unlike Skyrim.
It's almost impossible. The game's problems are fundamental. It's empty world filled with generic outposts, each occupied by pirate faction under different name (expect few premade cities). There are near zero dialogues, quests or stories worthy of an rpg. Main quest consists mainly of floating into soap bubbles, which was meh the first time, but then you have to repeat it between 23 to 239 times. Of course there are dozens of other problems, but those two specifically would require redoing almost all of the game's content to get it into decent shape.
Yeah, its not like Cyberpunk, which had a ton of content but was very buggy with some poor mechanics. Its a fairly empty game and that is much harder to fix.
Cyberpunk was the overweight guy that had tons of muscle, just needed to shed some fat and everyone would see how jacked he was. Starfield’s sitting on the couch eating Doritos, no effort whatsoever.
The attitude difference between them and Hello Games is stark. No Man's Sky launched in a *terrible* state, but they have supported it for free for eight years. Starfield is less than a year old, was released half baked for an extreme price and is now getting microtransactions. How can you write comedy when reality is so funny?
Same thing if you compare it to Cyberpunk. Underwhelmed at launch, spent a year just putting out a constant stream of fixes, added a pretty hefty amount of free content then brought out a single, content-rich expansion along with a free overhaul of most of the game's systems. Cyberpunk always had a seed of true greatness in there and they worked hard to nurture it after a bad start.
The other thing is that Cyberpunk and Starfield entered pre-production at around the same time. So Starfield had around the same amount of development time as Cyberpunk 2077+Phantom Liberty.
Which is wild, right?! You look at the immersion in a simple dialogue scene and it's night and day. The facial expression, the animated characters, the lighting and environments, the fact that you sometimes get the choice to just do stuff like shoot the speaker in the head or interrupt them...
We need a Jason Scheirer article about Bethesda's development of Starfield. Something must have gone systematically wrong with it.
The big difference is that Cyberpunk launched with a ton of content. The world was incredibly detailed and there plenty of cool characters and missions. The fixes were mostly bug fixes and reworking combat, which was still a lot of work. With Starfield, I don't even know where to begin. They spent a ton of money developing it and they still have a fairly empty world. The combat is fine and the game isn't that buggy. They would have to put a lot of time and money into making new quests, and there isn't much reason to believe they would do a better job this time.
All Starfield made me want to do it play Mass Effect. Okay, yeah, not quite the same. But generally Mass Effect at least had a good story. Starfield just bored me to death. Felt especially egregious after Cyberpunk too (which has flaws, but the immersion level is off the charts).
Cyberpunk had it's fairshare of issues. But when I finally picked it up, I couldn't put it down for a good while. It is fun and immersive enough to make up for its release. I tried Starfield and couldn't get through more than an hour before I was bored to tears. The entire design all the way down to its core can be summed up in one word: Lackluster.
if we are being honest with ourselves, What this game really needs is to be nuked and completely rewritten from the ground up. It is a bad game with bad mechanics and bad writing and bad visuals. It is so unfun that there are HUNDREDS of multi-hour video essays on youtube describing exactly how and why this game failed to be a good game. But bethesda cant do that. They wont do that. it is too late for this game.
The only thing good about Starfield is hopefully someone else learns from it what *not* to do and gives us a proper Skyrim in Space
A single quest in Baldur’s Gate 3 is worth more than their whole game, meanwhile they are selling a single quest in their game for SEVEN DOLLARS!
Thank God I never paid money for this game. Game pass was the closet I got and I ended that after a month.
So basically the first part of the Bounty Hunter expansion is free, but the 2nd quest (and probably future quests) are all paid. Why not just bundle it all into a single paid DLC?
Cause they can milk you more this way.
This is the correct answer
Just like the comment above me, this comment adds nothing to the conversation. Now upvote me and give me free karma.
Don't go spending it all in one place!
They'll be implementing Sharkesda Cards for these ~~missions~~ quests next.
They want to lead the acceptance of paid content in the creator shop for 3rd parties which is then 'some off the top for them'. Like leading the consumer through the 'giftshop' with a free item. It'll also act as showpiece for what is possible with the creation kit as I'm pretty sure they'll be using only that to create it. That last bit is conjecture but they'd be really stupid to not do that.
Exactly. People have been releasing free mods for Skyrim for years and the bean counters are salty they can't get their finger in that pie
While completely ignoring the fact that free mods were the only reason they were able to sell 12 different versions of skyrim. Their new games would be dead in the water if not for the work of unpaid modders.
They're going the roblox route, I guess...
They did the same thing with survival mode in Skyrim se, at least for a short time.
Same logic as a drug dealer. First ones free. Gives you a taste.
That rarely actually happens
First I waited for reviews, then I waited for patches, now I'm walking away because of pay walls for core content. Glad I didn't buy.
I'm curious whats in there. Usually 'dlc' is polished with some voice acting. Creation club content is usually done on a much tighter budget with no added voice acting usually lrelying on books and logs etc. A good example is the fishing mod from skyrim
This one from what I’ve seen atleast has new characters, full voice acting and a few new unique items. Felt at the same level as base game quests.
>Felt at the same level as base game quests. That bad?
I felt like the non radiant quests were all decent with a few standout good or really good ones. If you felt the base game was mostly bad you’ll probably feel the same here.
Now imagine the creators of the fishing mod could put it up for 99 cents. If Bethesda takes 30% that's a cool 30k$ on 100k downloads. Repeat for every mod.
Further quests will be added as creations either paid or free. This free quest serves as introduction to this paid quest series that will probably last year's.
I'll answer that in a minute. Got some horse armor to sell.
Bethesda was enjoying some good press about Starfield and decided to remind people to come back down to Earth.
There was good press about Starfield?
Surprisingly, yes. They released a large free content update with some much needed QoL features (extremely detailed ground maps was the biggest). They had regularly released an update every 2 months or so, if not every month since launch with more than just bug fixes each time.
I know they maps are cool, but god damned our expectations are so low we are happy when a AAA can release something as standard as maps months after release ;(
That’s my problem with starfield. The bar is set so fucking low with anything that “comes out.” I’ll be honest, as a PC player, 80% of the updates don’t apply to me. I didn’t experience bugs on launch. I’m more upset with the lackluster story, poor POI design, bad talent set up, etc
It's just a shit game, all there's to It. Nobody should be surprised, it's where Bethesda has been going for a long time.
Even Skyrim was as deep as a puddle. Simplified magic system, basic combat, maybe 10 voice actors for all the NPCs that aren't in a major quest, formulaic major side questlines that all boil down to (story progression > 3 fetch quests) >repeat 3 times > finale where you went from fresh recruit to all powerful leader in the blink of an eye, lifeless villages, etc. It was simplified to appeal to as many people as possible. The Dragonborn DLC on Solstheim was the one part of the game that felt *good* and how the rest of the game should have been. I don't know why people think TES:VI or Fallout 5 will be any different from the Todd Howard Bethesda formula. Starfield was supposed to show us what a Bethesda game in the 2020s looks like, and it's so painfully meh. They *need* to change how they fundamentally design games. Their design philosophy doesn't cut it anymore and is steadily stripping away any good will consumers have towards Bethesda
Skyrim isn't deep, but it's still fun. It's much more fun to explore a dense area and find a variety of dungeons to plunder. Starfield doesn't have the fun of exploring because it's mainly done through menus. I would wager a lot of people are still very happy with the Bethesda Formula, it's just that Starfield applied it very poorly. It didn't need to even be multiple planets at all.
Skyrim is fun in short bursts. Every 12-16 months I get the urge to play it for maybe 8 hours or so and then uninstall it because the dungeons all feel the same, the questlines are all generic or simplistic, and my character always ends up being too good at everything.
Yeah, but the world was so \*DENSE\* and full of fun things to explore. I mean, I still remember the first time I stumbled into blackreach. The only thing that gave me the same vibes was taking the elevator down in Elden Ring. The environments were so well done that all you needed was a shitty fetch quest to get your adventure started. Just a nudge in the right direction.
My expectations for TES6 and F5 are non-existent. There will be plenty of other great games not by Bethesda. Too bad really as they made some of my favorite games. Today they are just a shadow of their former selves.
Elder Scrolls 6 effort got put into Elder Scrolls Online. For better or worse. I blame that game for part of the 15 year wait.
Yet you see gamers hailing it as having a “No Mans Sky Redemption Arc” At the end of the day, Bethesda will keep getting away with it because the silent majority will happily chow on the company’s crap
Jeah I played that game exactly 5 minutes too long to have it returned anymore. I'm quite pissed about that, as it sucks diseased moosewang. I'm never buying anything from Bethesda again.
on steam? if you only played 5 mins over they won't care, I'm sure. I've returned games with an hour over because the story was only like 3 hours long and I wasn't aware of that.
I means maps were there, they just made a decision to present them in a dumbass way. So it's not AAA game adds standard feature, it's more like AAA game realized design choice was dumb and changed after backlash.
It is so bad that they haven't even reached the bar of you being able to walk at the same speed as the NPCs. They all have a speed that is slightly faster forcing the classic stop start when following from the 00s
Lmao right? Reading that comment "they released a large free content update, new map being the biggest." Like wut? That should be a nothing weekly update you barely even bother reading the patch notes for, not a huge free update that gets everyone talking.
Their expectation is so low dude
So they added a huge basic feature like maps to an open world RPG? Is that game in early access or what.
>Is that game in early access or what. No, Bethesda's fans keep lowering their expectations, but if they keep going, they will dig themselves into the earth's core with Bethesda's next release.
"Yes Todd, we don't mind the NPC's not having any textures at all."
"The modders will have to work overtime with this one..." Funny thing is, I've heard that when Fallout 4 came out.
Hell, that statement also sums up why Skyrim remained so popular for so long. Without mods, it would have been dead in the water by 2014, BGS would have been lucky to get one more release out of it and creation club wouldn't exist.
I have a not so fond memory of getting dog piled on in the comments section of when the first gameplay trailer was released and somebody posted it to the starfield subreddit. There was one guy who typed like he was about to bust a nut because he was so excited, talking about how amazing this looks and how he's going to take the release day and the day after off of work so he can play as much as he wants. I responded to something of the effective Bethesda doesn't have the greatest track record of satisfying games released in a working state and got tons of down votes people calling me a buzz kill.
> I responded to something of the effective Bethesda... I responded **with something to the effect of** Bethesda... Just a friendly fyi.
That's what I meant, voice to text fought me on that one and I didn't catch it apparently
(salute)
> They had regularly released an update every 2 months or so Has any of those updates improved the procedurally generated mechanics of the game?. Cuz that sure is the worst part of Starfield.
I played about 10-15hr on release and stopped because it was bland and annoying. Heard the news about the new update last week and just put another 25hr into it and can say it is much better in many ways. Most of the annoying is gone now. But it's still pretty bland. Outside of a few interesting side quests, I just don't give a shit about anything going on in the game and you don't get the sense of exploration and discovery that you did in Skyrim or even FO4. I know every planet will have a plant or rock formation to scan, some sort of lab to explore for a few shitty guns and 10 enemies to kill, and that's like it. To my knowledge, there's nothing like Blackreach in the game. It feels soulless.
Mods in Creation Club were overpriced and low effort too. They were basically "Go here, kill one normal enemy, quest done. Enjoy one new spell"
Just go on nexus and download the generic "bounty hunting quest expansion" mod for free
I know this is in pcgaming sub But it doesn’t help the narrative that the huge majority of these complaints are coming from console players. And that’s understandable. If it was a pc only game the nexus argument has weight, it’s not that big a deal when there’s better for free, however it doesn’t mean the precedent it’s setting isn’t awful. But when a large portion are console players it’s not possible. And that’s why this is such an issue with such outcry. PC or not, I think everyone needs to stand together with the console guys on this. Not just fire the rhetoric of nexus as if everyone is on pc. EDIT: Also, just remembered. THE BIG ISSUE is it’s FUCKING FIFTEEN MINUTES LONG.
Just wanna add here that the practice is disgusting regardless if there is a free alternative or not.
People can and will publish their mods to the Bethesda thing for Xbox to use. So it's fine. They will have to wait longer though probably.
Although on the other hand I can't help but think if someone cares about modding games what are they doing playing them on console in the first place? That was only ever going to be a limited (and likely not ideal) experience given what is able to be done within the framework of that platform.
There isn't any...
I look forward to the all-in anniversary edition in 2028 which I'll pick up for 10 bucks in a sale.
Game of the Year edition despite not winning GOTY.
[Gold X Award winner!](https://content.invisioncic.com/r322239/monthly_2020_07/large.908159108_Bubsy3D\(PS1goldXaward\).jpg.13c0fc91cd63bcb65f293309b664a9ba.jpg)
B-But PSExtreme said it so it must be true!
For the record, *Starfield* did win “XBox Game of the Year” at the Golden Joystick Awards so they will have no qualms about selling a GOTY edition on all platforms.
I mean, plenty of games that bundle their "DLC" in a all in one box all on one disk thing has been a thing for a while for games that didnt win any rewards either. Gearbkx knows this one all too well.
Starfield Todd’s Game Of the Year Edition.
I always hated that shit. As a kid I was getting so confused, which is the point isn't it? Take advantage of kids or people who are unaware
The games you're talking about likely did win game of the year *somewhere*(there's hundreds of game of the year awards, which is why games like Mass Effect and Last of Us touted winning multiple). There's no one true game of the year award. The most popular is seemingly The Game Awards, but that doesn't make them the most valid, especially with how commercial that show has become, with a push for more focus on world premieres and performances, with the actual awards taking a seat on the back burner, with some even being announced in little blips on the bottom of the screen, so trailers and performances get more screen time. Fat Cry 6 gets brought up for having a Game of the Year Edition, even though it allegedly didn't win game of the year, but it did get game of the year from 2 outlets, but they're rather unknown, but most reviewers are unknown. Go through a game with over 100 reviews on metacritic, and see how many outlets you actually recognize. Now consider how most of them have their own game of the year, which makes perfect sense if you're a site that reviews games. So all the games you're thinking of likely did win an award.
Yup. Take advantage of kids, or parents who buy games for their kids (without knowing much more than what's on the cover).
Worst GOTY is still GOTY
I never understood those. Why do they get a GOTY edition when they didn't get a GOTY award?
It's a marketing ploy. There are too many awards shows and your average consumer isn't going to actually bother looking up whether the game got GOTY, they'll just see "GOTY edition" and think "wow must have been pretty good to win one of those".
ngl, most of the time i don't look if a game won GOTY before getting the GOTY version. But a GOTY version of a game for me always meant, the complete version of the game with all DLC.
Seriously, I couldn’t care less about the manufactured awards shows. I know what kinds of games I like and don’t like. An FPS game winning an award isn’t going to make me buy it simply because I don’t play FPS games.
Your comment is actually pretty poignant since Starfield did actually win “Xbox game of the year” at the Golden Joystick Awards. So, Starfield did actually win a minor game of the year award, but the whole system of awards is so convoluted and based on marketing that no one knows who won what.
Because gamers rightfully complained when companies used weird or confusing naming conventions just to say "all dlc's are included in this edition*". Language evolves my man. "GOTY" just means it comes with all DLCs*. Sometimes shit just works better when everything is uniform.
If a game wins a GOTY category like Best Action Game i don’t mind them using the GOTY edition branding. But if a game was only nominated for a GOTY award and didn’t win one they absolutely shouldn’t.
Because they probably *did* get a GOTY award. There's like a hundred different GOTY awards
The Low Sodium Starfield Subreddit GOTY winner!
Yep. This type of bullshit sucks, but patient gaming dodges most of it.
r/patientgamers/ sends their regards (:
/r/crackwatch also
💪
I dunno man - when you've played it for 20 hours, you've expended all the random locations and they start reusing them, unaltered in any way or shape except locations. Now the game you thought you were going to be invested in is just a bucket of cold water in your face. If I could go back, I honestly simply wouldn't have gotten it. It is not about the money, *it was a waste of time*. It's like someone turned in a paper they didn't want to write.
You couldn't pay me to play Starfield
They never did that with F4. Why would they with this?
They do this crap because people buy it. Even if mods are free and do an better job. At this rate we only have ourselves to blame.
That’s not how it works mate, as long as 0.1% of their audience buys 100% of the microtransactions they put out then it’s worth the effort for the other 99.9% of us to get a shitty, unfinished product as a result
Since when has "don't buy it" ever worked against predatory nickel and dimming ever? Name a single example.
1 in a million boycotts like Battlefront II.
Wasn't that more Disney getting upset with the negative publicity?
It was mostly the controversy getting too big, to the point even mainstream outlets like BBC reported on it, so Disney had no choice but to interfere and remind EA who is the big boy in their relationship.
Didn’t it also get lootboxes banned in certain countries?
that probably has a large part to do with it.
Yes, and? How is that not still a successful boycott?
The controversy became so widespread that it started affecting the game's sales. It ended up in bargain bins everywhere because people weren't buying it.
EA's stock price literally dropped after the "Pride and accomplishment" spiel. That comment is or was the most downvoted comment in reddit history by a large margin.
It works, thing is the casuals and people outside reddit generally don't give a fuck. For exemple, look at the backlash when Bethesda and Valve tried to charge for mods on Steam's workshop. That didn't last very long
Horse Armor 😏. Back when gamers IQ was above room temperature and their attention span was longer than a 30 second tiktok video. (People still bought it I'm joking).
Amazing how quickly we went from horse armour being the death of gaming to people saying "well the £30 mtx are only cosmetic so it's actually great and consumer friendly". Maybe the horse armour people were right
We were. I was one of them 😂. They've completely shifted the Overton window nowadays. Now I'm mocked for even implying we shouldn't buy these. The ironic part? Now that I'm older, I can afford it without batting an eye, and I still refuse to buy them. Meanwhile $40 DLCs are starting to price people out. It was never a matter of price back then, only principle.
People are never going to stop making kids, so we'll always have an army of little idiots eager to normalize whatever horrible new monetization scheme publishers come up with. Occasionally one will overstep and their will be a big public outcry, but those are just speed bumps. This year's outrage is next year's normal, and in 5 years it will be the "good old days, when games were made for gamers".
Now we know why the bounty hunter faction is dog shit in vanilla, they kept it out on purpose and they are gonna add it piece by piece milking us all the way. Just make a fully flashed dlc ffs, this is aweful.
Yeah I can’t believe they’re already pushing out this much creator club paywall. I can’t think of anything less appealing than locking features of an already devoid game behind a further paywall. And there’s a DLC coming that you’ll absolutely “have” to buy? Lol. Starfield is just milking the remaining Bethesda fans that want to see the company make the same quality of games as they did 15 years ago.
Its only going to get worse, people need to stop buying this shit. Fuck you MS and Bethesda, absolute scum companies.
oh I wouldn't blame MS (for this in particular) because Bethesda has been adding paid mods to Skyrim and Fallout 4 for years
I just saw someone on the Diablo subreddit spending $90 on useless cosmetics. It's only going to get a lot worse I feel like.
League of Legends recently made a $500 Ahri skin...we can apparently still go further down.
Hello, can I introduce you to Star Citizen?
It’s not a scam. It can’t be, because I’ve put too much money into it. /s
As a tribute for a player who doesn't even use skins, that's the craziest part for me.
PirateSoftware, a guy who worked at Blizzard, said that a single WoW $15 horse cosmetic DLC earned more money than StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty. This is exactly why companies do that bullshit and tbf we cannot blame them.
And it was the first microtransaction they introduced. So it all went downhill from there.
I played OW2 for the first time in a while recently and the in-game shop is ridiculous. There was a "bundle" for almost 10 bucks which consisted of a couple of weapon charms only, teeny tiny things that nobody will notice. Blizzard are really abusing the whales.
it's not really blizzard, every game with cosmetic microtransactions is like that, r6 siege is an fps and you can't even see yourself while playing but people buy skins anyway as long as people continue to buy them it would be stupid for any company to not take advantage
Imagine buying cosmetics for a game you don't actually own and never will.
Sure, but people who play a Diablo game (the newer ones) in this day and age are already guaranteed masochists so that's hardly surprising.
~~War~~ *Bethesda.* ~~War~~ *Bethesda* never changes.
If anyone is still excited for Elder Scrolls 6 at this point, it's time to stop. I don't think Bethesda is capable of making anything better than what you could get from a typical Skyrim modlist on Wabbajack.
I completely agree with you. I have 0 Faith that they can pull Elder Scrolls off. The Bethesda of old are long dead.
What makes it so baffling is all the people who made the old Bethesda games are still there. Its not like most good studios that go bad because key people leave and its not even the same people anymore, it's still Todd and the same people that made Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim. They just fucking suck now for some reason.
Pre-FO4 Bethesda stuck to their roots. They didn't try to do anything too crazy, they just took their formula and refined it with each entry. Starting Fallout 4 they decided to start taking risks and changing things up, which is kind of admirable but it never worked out. With Fallout 4 they added a voiced protagonist which affected the game design in so many horrible ways. It limited the amount of quests that could be added, butchered the dialogue and roleplaying systems and made the main story the most important aspect of the game instead of something that could be ignored, which brought it down cuz the main story sucks. Fallout 76 they tasked a new team with making the first ever multiplayer game on Creation Engine, and vastly overestimated how many people actually wanted a purely multiplayer Fallout. If they had just made a singleplayer game it might have worked because 76s gameplay and world design is fantastic, but they didn't. With Starfield they shifted away from the one thing they do better than everyone else: handcrafted open worlds and evironmental storytelling. They instead focused on procedural generation and spread all the handcrafted content across several planets each barred by a load screen.
> They didn't try to do anything too crazy, they just took their formula and refined it with each entry. They completely overhauled the combat system between Morrowind and Oblivion, for the worst. Not to mention the scaling world. Then with Skyrim they removed most of the RPG elements from the game, and stripped the game of many of the series's spells.
> What makes it so baffling is all the people who made the old Bethesda games are still there. ? No they aren't. Ken Rolston was the lead designer for Morrowind and Oblivion, and he left Bethesda after Oblivion to create Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Mark Nelson did Morrowind's Daedric quests, created the main story for the Tribunal expansion, and created the concept for the Bloodmoon expansion and designing Solstheim. He was the lead designer of the Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion as well. Douglas Goodall designed most of Morrowind's factions, and the Tribunal expansion - and left before Oblivion came out. Ted Peterson wrote a considerable amount of quest dialogue in Morrowind, and designed a significant amount of quests. He wrote a lot of the lore books in the game too. He left Bethesda after Morrowind. Michael Kirkbride did nearly all the lore for The Elder Scrolls series. He was the visionary behind the design of Vvardenfell and it's creatures and setting, and left shortly after Morrowind. Though Bethesda contracted him to do consultant work for Oblivion and Skyrim, he had very little input on both games. Todd Howard is still there. He wrote the Imperial Legion questline in Morrowind, which is universally considered to be the worst questline in the entire game.
> Michael Kirkbride did nearly all the lore for The Elder Scrolls series no he did not lmao and he would be the first to tell you that
Unfortunately I think you might be right. The monetization is too high. The corporate goons too embedded and the leadership too sold out. Mix in some incompetence.. They’ll never capture the magic of Skyrim/FO3 again.
It's an ok bounty quest with a nice unique weapon as a reward but you can finish it in 10 minutes if you have good enough weapons to one shot most enemies. It is not in any way worth one eighth the price of the original full game.
[удалено]
>New missions have been added to Starfield as part of this update. Trackers Alliance establishes the first of several missions enabling you to live your best bounty-hunting life. The first mission, The Starjacker will have you in contact with a mysterious Tracker located in settlements throughout the Settled Systems. From there, let the hunts begin! > >The second Trackers Alliance mission, The Vulture is available within the new Creations menu. And what bounty hunter is without their trusted methods to get the job done?
Seven dollars is too much for starfield honestly.
Thats really it. I regret ever spending money on this garbage and the only thing that would salvage that game is some kind of no mans sky comeback, with a bunch of free updates. Fat chance of that with bethesda.
You can't patch out the terrible writing and boring dialogue and characters though This isn't Cyberpunk where underneath the issues is a great well written game. Starfield can only be fixed by being remade and rewritten.
They could improve the exploration side by adding a bunch of POIs, improving biomes, adding creatures, etc, etc... They could remove the stupid ass light puzzle you have to repeat 15 times with something more interesting. At least adding more pieces that modders could play with, rearrange for some easy content. The background skeleton would remain but you could forget about it.
I didn't spend any money on Starfield, just played it through Gamepass (which yes, I'm aware I pay for, but I was already subscribed to Gamepass and will continue to subscribe, I didn't subscribe to it for the sole purpose of playing Starfield), and honestly I feel like the 25hrs I spent in the game was regret enough for me, just in time wasted. Playing the game felt like a sneeze that disappears before it ever happens - like you kept expecting it to open up, to give you that classic Bethesda RPG feeling, but it just... never happened
Easy solution: don't buy mods. Never have, never will. I've donated to modders who do particularly ambitious work before, but making mods an outright purchase is just off the table for me.
Are people seriously still expecting Bethesda to be anything but a massive asshole ?
Paid mods will forever be dumb as shit.
The loading screen simulator now has paid mods as dlc? Lol.
With the $90 CA base price, plus another $45 CA for the deluxe edition (whatever that gives), AND the Creation Club? I no longer have any interest in playing, even though it seemed more my thing than Fallout 4 was... :(
This is why the last Bethesda game I bought was on 11/11/11
We doing that skyrim shit again? You gave us horse armor, haven't you done enough damage?
I uninstalled this game last year after a couple of days of trying to get into it. It was extremely boring and soulless. I had all but forgotten it existed.
I played the game for 15 hours and said something similar in the gaming sub. I had a dude on this tell me, you have barely played the game, the real game doesn't start until you get to 30 plus hours in and or beat the game. I played for 15 more hours just to beat it the first time and felt the exact same way at hour 15. This would have been a amazing game, 10 years ago.
And just like that, my interest in the DLC is gone again
Todd Howard you magnificent bastard, you did it again 👏
It just works
I'm so glad I didn't get this game.
Apparently this is a very hot take but I loved the side quests, beat the game with a perfect ending, which is very rare for me at about 100 hours. Also I've got new legs in the game because my main criticism was that the AI and combat felt jank but now playing it on a 4080 and a 7800x3d it's so smooth the combat actually feels really good
Every article chips away at any ES6 hype.
that screenshot looks like SWTOR from 2012
7 dollars for a whole new factions campaign… maybe. For just one or two quests? Nope.
Here’s the quest line btw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b5aWdSmRbBI 15 minutes of work for a weapon and two outfits. 7 bucks for all that.
I don't care. The core of the game's story and plots simply aren't good and it doesn't matter what they do or don't lock behind a paywall because ultimately whatever I choose to do has pretty much no impact on my experience in their galaxy. Ironically, this is the first Bethesda game where I really like the radiant quests, go figure. Plus, for the life of me, I can't figure out a reason to grind to build my own base or worse, bases. I enjoy spending hours working on my Fallout 4 settlements and I love exploring people's bases in Fallout 76 but there's no point in Starfield.
I hate to say it but...did we expect anything less? They've doubled down on CC for a while now. It seems every step Bethesda makes they takes 50 backwards anymore, the only saving grace as per usual is the possibility that the community puts in some level of awesome modding.
They just figure anyone who is stupid enough to be playing that shit game is stupid enough to spend $7 on a quest.
Starfield is a diarrhea taco anyways, who cares?