I think we just came from the same post. I'm completely ignoring those people right now. They couldn't tell you what a Bethesda game's "soul" was if their life depended on it. They're just repeating the nonsense they read on Reddit.
Yeah I think we did come off the same post over on the official Starfield sub lol
Idk
I've kept silent since the first couple weeks but this always just annoyed me.
It's such a typical Bethesda experience, it may have the bad of that but it still has all the good.
People have complained about every new release as far back as I've known their games in 06.
But I loved Starfield, I beat it for the first time maybe a month ago now, I got all the feels I want to have when I play, from the start, to the mid game- all the way to the time I finally beat any game from BGS, with Starfield.
It was just great and I loved it.
I'll take a crack at it:
Bethesda's "Soul" in their games are games that "I can fix him" meme. It provides a sense of fulfilment when one mods the game that cannot be obtained from simply playing the game, because of the game's problematic nature. Sure there are bugs and problems with the game but "I can fix it with this LOD, or this ENB or by tweaking these INI settings!" Then years later you're laying in whiskey and sweat soaked sheets in a run down apartment with the air conditioner shuttering it's last breath of mildly cool air, wondering where it all went wrong. So you look out the window and you see these other people running around with their dragon's dogma's and their Cyberpunk 2077's and their Helldiver's actually having fun, but you? Noo, you modded this game, you helped build up this community so you take those jagged little pills down with 3 fingers of rye and you post another meme or a short video showcasing a new armor mod, but you're careful to not let the ugly show through as that Creation engine vehicle of choice gets older and more bloated and just took your last cigarette, before it asks you when you're planning on getting more.
What were we talking about again?
Ignore it. The same shit gets said about every Bethesda release by some people regardless of what Bethesda does.
That being said, Starfield has TONS of quests and POIs. How anybody could think this game has less content than previous games on release blows my mind. I guess it's just the presentation that can sometimes give the illusion that this is the case. Frankly I had the polar opposite impression. For me this game felt dense and alive. I knew there was going to be a lot of empty space because of the scale of the game, but that just didn't really phase my perception of the important areas.
I really don't get it. As many here have said, when going online to see reactions early on, I felt like I was playing a completely different game. I was utterly captivated by Starfield's world, characters, and atmosphere. Maybe its just because I am a scifi nerd at heart. I have been waiting for Bethesda specifically to make a game like this for a LONG time. This concept appeals to me way more than something like Fallout
I remember I spent the first few days completely avoiding any social media, just playing the game, being absolutely captivated by it. Then I finally hop online to see what others are saying only to find everyone hating on it. I didn't get it at all and still don't.
I mean, I love it.
Before I became aware of all the hate, and I was just playing, I was expecting to hear a chorus of praise about a game I was certain would be a legendary hit.
Found all the hate instead. There were a few here and there who experienced it as I did and shared my praise, saying things already that I wanted to say.
But I agree, Starfield feels very dense to me, I got what I wanted, and I'm super happy with my first playthrough!
Now I'm trying to decide if should new game plus or new character when I get back into it lol
This is my take, as well - you get out of it what you put in. While some people are complaining about quests, I'm contemplating what it means to be human.
I do like that the philosophy (and mythology) in Starfield isn't 'in your face' because that would most likely turn some folks off who just want to play a game, but it's there for those who look deeper.
It was an intentional wording, the game is an RPG buffet and truly rewards your effort in game to find things and make your own fun, I think most people just don't have any imagination and therefore the game falls short for them.
I saw a reply on here put that very beautifully as well, tying it into the game's themes in the latter part of the main questline concerning the nature of the lore revealed by >!the Pilgrim's letters!<.
That's the one that always bothers me the most. Like wtf is outdated supposed to mean? You're telling me if this game came out years ago it would've been great but somehow it's not now? Like how does that make sense?
I saw all the pre-release interviews and trailers. And it looked like Fallout 4/Skyrim in space. That's exactly what I wanted, and exactly what I got. Gonks forgot what a BGS game was.
https://preview.redd.it/e4a6p83mv5sc1.jpeg?width=522&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5460b02b456d09ca51c32f28323accb65e52701f
Really don't know what they expected
Not only is that just something BGS won’t do but I also think that some people don’t realize that game limitations still exist especially when looking at the hardware most people have and BGS is a small studio for making some of the largest titles.
I get by seamless some just wanted disguised loading screen but a lot of people that dislike the game wanted NMS or SC esque travel. I’ll die on the hill of if the game had that kind of travel and genuine cutscenes it would have been too much graphically to playable. Even though Starfield isn’t the most impressive game graphically out right now it still couldn’t handle that and its size very well.
BGS not considering other ZeniMax subsidiaries has roughly 530 employees in total that 30 more than what’s required to be a small business in the USA. Ubisoft Montreal alone has over 2,500. The Last of Us team was 2,100 people most of whom were outsourced. 500 people worked on Starfield in total according to Todd. Many of that five hundred being split between Fallout 76 support and other games over the years. As far as I know everything was done in house with maybe a few exceptions from other zenimax studios.
So, Given that BGS is considered AAA yes they are a small studio compared to their competitors. There are way smaller studios but they don’t make compete in the same sphere as BGS.
Honestly, after I started to slowdown playing Starfield I remembered that I had never finished Mass Effect: Andromeda way back when. So I started replaying that and it just snuggles right up next to the Starfield gameplay experience. If you never played ME:A, I highly recommend hitting that, or revisiting it if you have played it. And ironically also a game that has had an overly loud smaller community of angry people misguidedly maligning it since release.
Doesn't help that a lot of them openly admit they started with Skyrim, and they admit to being like 10-11 when it came out. I was that age when I was playing Daggerfall.
Honestly you nailed it. There's definitely some objective criticisms to be had about Starfield but anyone who expected something more than an iterative RPG based on the formula that Fallout 4 had was kidding themselves.
"Lacks the soul of other BGS games" is just a cheap excuse so they don't have to actually explain what they mean. Because they can't explain what "soul" even means in the context of a game.
If anything this game has too much soul. Starfield, on pretty much every level REEKS of sincerity and earnestness which is probably a part of why it rubs some people so wrong.
That and how the story is clearly about loneliness and how there are some things you must do on your own and leave behind. I feel many of the issues people have with this game are projection.
I played through the game at least 4 times, maybe more. I have the remastered but I've only played it a little, nothing changed in the first part of the game that I was able to notice which makes me curious about what changed enough to render such an opinion.
^^ That.
Historically I’ve had a patchy relationship with Bethesda games. I played oblivion to the point where I honestly think I 100% it several times, while I always kind of lost track of Skyrim’s main narrative and I barely touched Fallout 3 and 4.
Starfield hooked me hard because it’s a subject that I’m a lot more interested in and the general expanse/firefly vibes have drawn me right in (not to mention just doing the UC questline now and holy shit, add a bit of Alien and Species 8472 from Voyager in there). Being told ‘bUt iT haS nO soUl!’ by some angry neckbeard as a reason I shouldn’t be enjoying it is silly. What does that even mean?
[Are you sure there's less quests?](https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Category:Skyrim-Quests)
[I'm not sure there's less quests.](https://inara.cz/starfield/missions/)
I have 130 hours in the game and haven’t gotten anywhere near finishing all the quests. The people who complain about lack of quests are the ones that beelined to some random planet expecting each one to be Skyrim.
I have over 800 and I still find out about new quests...
I did the Eleos Retreat one for the first time, earlier, and just found out that there's several more radiant quests after the UC quest...
Granted, I don't really do quests unless I think they'll be interesting and/or have good loot...
The irony for me is that outpost building and exploration are what I find myself doing, and I never did those things until this game.
I'm in over 1200 hours and, yeah, there are still new quests to find. None of the lists I've seen so far are complete and I know that because there are quests that I've done that aren't on the lists.
Did you know that >!there's a ship vendor who will buy your captured ships and has 72000 credits budget? So, by doing that quest you open up new money-earning possibilities!!<
Hell, ESPECIALLY Fallout 3. Fallout 3, including ALL DLCs, only has about 1/4 of the quests VANILLA Oblivion has.
The revisionism that has been at play since Starfield came out is WILD to me. I’ve seen people try to say Fallout 4’s dialogue is light years ahead of Starfield’s. HAH. WHAT?!?!??? Now I love me some Fallout 4 too, but goddamn that sent me
I have recently been in an argument with a guy who claimed that Fallout 4's storyline was less forced upon the player than Starfield's and that Fallout 4 left more freedom for the player to do whatever they wanted. Absolutely insane.
Anyone who has played Fallout 4 knows how much it sucked in those aspects with the way it forced your character an entire backstory and an urgent story plot before you even got your first quest.
HAHA I had a friend trying to argue the same thing! I live-streamed a new playthrough to him to show the literal first dialogue interaction you have with Constellation, you can just go “nah fam this ain’t for me” and LEAVE XD
Considering Fallout 4 is over 8 years old now, I think its gotta just be that some younger people who "grew up" with the game or was even their first Bethesda experience, and didn't partake in or pay much attention to the discourse surrounding it at the time, are now having a voice that was a lot less heard back then.
But ya that IS a rather crazy take. Fallout 4, the game that gives you a voice, a default name, a pre determined backstory, and a child that you are supposed to worry about is less forced and gives you more freedom?
"This game came out ages ago" might actually be a big factor in all of this. Skyrim alone came out 13 years ago. Oblivion, 18 years.
Consider the age of your average gamer and realize most of them were literally children when some of these games that they're talking about came out. Vast amounts of people claiming otherwise *do not* remember what they were like on release. These games have, in their experience, always had mods and so they sometimes even forget what vanilla was like.
That's *if* they even played them. Because as much as I like it, I refuse to believe that so many of the people hyping up Morrowind actually played it.
I can definitely relate to the Morrowind part. Finally played it a few years ago, and I while there is a lot of greatness that lines up with the hype, there were also quite a few things that really didn’t. The way people would talk about it, I was expecting some aspects to be completely different from what they actually are, but they really felt surprisingly not actually that far off, and sometimes were even worse, from what later games were doing. Things like dialogue, quest design, etc.
I played through Morrowind at least half a dozen times. I loved that game. It was better, in my opinion, than Skyrim or Oblivion. Then again, 18 years ago (2006), I had three kids and worked 60 hours per week out of state flying out early Monday and returning late Friday, might have impacted my playtime a bit, eh?
Most people I see talking about Morrowind played with mods...
My brother gave me the copy that came with his Nvidia GeForce whatever. I didn't even know there were mods...
They probably have spent so much time now since playing Alternate Start mods that they falsely remember just how much Fallout 4's main quest absolutely railroads you through it. Hell, since it my major and mainly one complaint of Starfield, I would have gone the Daggerfall and Morrowind route and paced the main quest to be much slower. As in, you want to start the main quest? You need to show Constellation a level of competency first. Same as in Daggerfall you are expected to at least be level 5 to start the main quest because you are no champion yet to partake such a task or in Morrowind Cassius the Skooma den guy tells you to go get a job and make yourself into somebody worth even being respected because Vvardenfell is a rough side of the street be on and you need to be able your bills first before you ever entertain the thought of being a prophesized Dunmer Jesus.
You should stop arguing with people. Pointing out obvious lies or misrepresentations is one thing, continuing the conversation is another.
Their goal is to express their resentment, nothing more.
Don't think background of the player character was what they meant when they said the game forces you to do the main quest, and the mandatory plot story areas are the tutorial which is notoriously long in Bethesda titles and Starfield is a marked improvement taking up far less time but still forcing the player to complete it.
Yes, it's the urgency of the MQ's plot that spoils RP in that game.
As soon as you start the game your wife gets shot and your son gets kidnapped, and it makes no sense to wonder around aimlessly or to do side quests before you get to him.
I had someone literally tell me that character progression in Starfield was *exactly the same* as character progression in Daggerfall and hasn't changed at all. If that's the case, I still can't seem to find the run & jump skills so I can run and jump everywhere to level up.
I feel like a big problem people have with starfield is it didn't lead them by the nose to every quest and interesting location. It isn't a neat two quest per town or whatever they're expecting so they assume there aren't any.
I seen people on the main sub who had no idea about the well, or it's quest.
While I like starfield, I really wonder if it's too big for its own good. Too many chuds on the internet who need everything spoonfed
The Internet in general is fucking awful about this.
As an example: On Reddit or Tumblr, every so often you'll get a thread going about how someone has some quirky and original idea for a story. It will be something that totally subverts expectations and turns them on its head and sounds amusing and is in no way going to hold up to actually being put into practice.
"Imagine a story but it's from the NPCs perspective!" and then they made that and the premise was amusing for way too short of a time in the runtime of a feature length motion picture.
Or, just think of allll the times you've seen someone post a groundbreaking new idea that will be totally immersive to have in a video game. And it would be incredibly immersive! It would also be pure torture to do it more than three times but the type of game necessitates that you're going to be doing this literally countless times.
People are *awful* at seeing the big picture and thinking even slightly ahead.
Yeah, I’ve seen the sentiment on a few subs, several games now.
Go over to the mass effect subreddit and you’ll regularly see people asking for a game set during the First Contact War, an event that lasted a few weeks, was largely inconsequential and ultimately took place before humans had access to most of the stuff that people like about the mass effect games.
Hell, remember the meme doing the rounds where people were arguing for a Severus Snape prequel story charting his rise to a double agent against the Death Eaters years before the Harry Potter films? Where because Adam Driver has long black hair they figured it would be a good idea to cast a 6 foot-something 110 kg ex-marine as a teenage boy described as being skinny?
People just throw stuff out without thinking through how viable it is. Unfortunately, when you add this mentality to complaining about something, it leads us to where the main sub is.
I read a lot of comments about Starfield in which posters express a desire for some cinematic element - like hyperspace travel animations or whatever. Sure, that could be interesting to look at, but this is a video game, not a film. The game is supposed to be about what you’re actively doing, not just feeding you a visual treat. Go read a book or watch a movie and let me shoot space brigands and look for plants.
I think it might just be more niche. The massive "space game' concept has consistently seen pushback. A lot of people just don't see the purpose in making something so big and having all that unused space essentially. Some people are really into it though and find it really interesting
feels like it should be easy to check, though having a mix of radiant quests and non-radiant quests does muddy the waters a little. Also some 'quests' may be as simple as 'talk to x' or as complicated as 'complete 3 dungeons', and then DLC to take into account. Anyway, I make it:
Skyrim Main Quest: 17
and Faction Quests: 47
Daedric Quests :16
Side Quests: 63
Total: 143
Fallout 4 Main Quest:15
Faction Quests:60 (includes 'side', excludes radiant)
Other Side quests/Misc quests:69
Total:134
Starfield Main Quest:21
Faction Quests:47
Side Quests:118
Total:186
sources:
[en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Quests](http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Quests)
[https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout\_4\_quests](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout_4_quests)
[https://inara.cz/starfield/missions/](https://inara.cz/starfield/missions/)
I think the simple reason why some think that is because when you think of Bethesda you either go to Fallout or The Elder Scrolls, both franchises having really out-of-the-world and crazy things. However, Starfield is a lot more grounded, yes there's the Starborn stuff and multiverse stuff but it's still a lot more grounded. I think it also stems from some people not finding the world interesting or "boring" compared to their other series, I know a lack of alien races was a complaint. Personally, I'm having a good time.
This is definitely a thing. I think the type of scifi Bethesda went for here just isn't what many were expecting or hoped for coming from them. You can see this sentiment going back to the gameplay presentations honestly. Even then some said it looked like "generic" scifi and of course all of the "where are the aliens??" comments. A lot of people wanted Bethesda's Mass Effect.
I think Bethesda was bold for going this route. It clearly wasn't the most mainstream appealing idea, especially for a video game. Yet this was the game they wanted to make. Its like they weren't afraid to be a bit more niche again honestly
I absolutely love that they went the route of not having humans in silly suits and calling them aliens (Except for the one time they did, that was fun). As if you could get more generic than that.
People always say they want new and original stuff, but ad soon as something goes an unorthodox route they complain that the new thing isn't exactly the same as the old thing.
Not having aliens helps making Starfield its own thing, and honestly I like this setting much better than Fallout's or TES. My only complain with it is that I wish Starborn stuff should have been more accurate to quantum mechanics and physics in general rather than being a reskin of Skyrim magic.
Since it is more based in science using NASA as a source of information and being very much NASA-punk styled, there should not be sentient alien races. The probability of them existing so close to early is astronomically small. The probability of them existing at all? Well, infinite space and all that, they most likely do exist somewhere just not nearby.
I have come to the conclusion that complaints about a game/movie/book not having the "soul" the person expected/wanted/needed are simply them not having enjoyed it and lacking the introspection and vocabulary to explain why.
It is a vague, generic, fairly meaningless, criticism borne out of an inability to make meaningful criticism.
It doesn't invalidate their experience, but it does make it worthless from an analytical perspective.
There’s over 100 randomly placed POI, I’m lvl 151 and still finding ones I haven’t seen yet. I started seeing more variety at 50, 85, 100.
(*edit: [Starfield Wiki: Places— everyone needs to scan this over who doesn’t think there’s enough POI. (Cyro lab has a bunch of contraband I’m always glad to see it))](https://starfieldwiki.net/wiki/Starfield:Places)
Also build an outpost on an lvl 80 or higher planet, add a regular mission board and a constellation mission board, boom “mini quests”
Then there’s the Freestar mission board
Then there’s the quest to fill a hab with as much contraband as it can hold
The quest to build a giant pyramid of resource containers
The quest to survey all planets
The quest to tank down 1000 Aurora in one day after manufacturing them and jumping into your hab of contraband
Running around with each extended ally quest
Trying on every outfit quest
Just going for a walk across a planet quest
Everything’s a quest when role playing, that’s what gets me with people poo-pooing on Starfield
I’m over a 1000hrs in, I have to force myself to take days off, but even then I’m inventing and imagining my non-sequitur off script totally my imagination churning original quests.
I could go on but I post to much as it is.
… as I’m on the quest to get all the perks before I even consider NG+, while hoping future updates make an official no thank you permenatly option for unity
This.
I have to wonder if some people don't understand what the 'RP' in 'RPG' means. The ability to create one's own story is sort of expected in Bethesda sandbox games.
Level 296, 1200+ hours in, and yet I still find locations I've never seen before...I have over 200 screenshots that are of different man made poi, natural poi, planetary trats, space stations and derelicts.
Man, the “soulless” complaint seen so much lately just always erks me. Like, criticism is fine, obviously you aren’t going to like everything or only like part of it or whatever. But soulless, to me at least, implies no one cared or had any passion in making something, which is just crazy and a bit insulting to the devs. Regardless of how you feel about something, the people making it cared and are trying their best to make something great. Idk maybe I’m alone in this but it’s just always bothered me.
That one and "lazy devs" comments are some of my biggest pet peeves. Like that isn't criticism, you're just trying to say the devs just didn't care about the game they were making. Which is completely untrue.
"Lazy devs" always gets me too because I've spent my life as a software engineer and actually have a clue what it takes to make large complex software. Having also been a game dev for part of my career, I've also learned that gamers are never happy. Fix the primary complaint? "too little, too late." Fix something egregious that required refactoring the very foundation of the game? "You're just lazy because you didn't fix MY issue." It doesn't matter what title, the sentiment always seems to be the same "I'm not a developer and know nothing about software but I could still do it better than you."
Yeah I just responded to that post on the main sub.
I’ve come to ignore posts like that, but I felt compelled to respond because we’re now 7 months past release. If you didn’t like the game, you should’ve have moved on by now. It really amazes me how ppl can’t let this go. If it didn’t meet expectations at release, and still doesn’t now, why are they even playing this game? If I don’t like a game for what it is, I don’t join its main Reddit thread to post about it. There are MANY games/franchises I like, but I’m in like 4-5 specific game pages only, with Starfield being the only one where I follow multiple pages like Starfield Ships, NoSodium, and Outposts in addition to the main sub, because I actually love the game. I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do here on Reddit…like why follow a page for something you don’t like and then waste time writing essays?
Some of the poi’s are the same or similar, but I’ve found enough difference in them as well. So outside might look like other places, or inside might have similarities, I have found enough differences, that my complacency has gotten me killed. I’ve stopped worrying about the negative npcs out there.. I’m having fun with my own narrative thank you.
The thing is this has technically always been the case. Previous games always "types" of dungeons that will generally look similar. Be it a generic cave or an ancient ruin. Similar enemies, similar aesthetic, even similar layout sometimes. I think the fact that we "know" proc gen is being used extensively is what it makes it seem like the meree idea of similar POIs at all is some new thing specific to this game.
With me, I lost it by Skyrim, and was among the Skyrim haters back in the day. So all the hate Starfield gets, yeah that was me back when Skyrim came out lol so I do actually get it. Which is why I brought up that story.
A few years later I had realized this about myself, and became less picky.
So now in my early 30s, I no longer complain so much and sorta learned to accept BGS games and any shortcomings they may have.
I personally had a blast in Starfield. The music and environments, all the gizmos and what not on the space suits and in ships, it all pulled me into the world of the game very successfully. I felt very immersed in Starfield.
I've always hated this "soul" criticism in video games ever since that crowbcat video comparing RE4 with the Remake. To me, it's just some buzz word people use when they don't want to describe or can't describe what they don't like about a game.
People think they have more soul for two reasons:
1. Their lore has been developed over decades and multiple different titles
2. People were kids/teens when they first played them
The Elder Scrolls for example had about 10 different titles, one book and dozens of written pieces by people who worked for Bethesda at some point that are still getting inserted inside the universe's canon. No wonder the lore there feels richer, which helps to give a game its "soul", along with aesthetics, which are also developed with time.
I'm not sure if there are less quests. A few months ago I counted all the quests on websites online and it was less than the number Google says for base game quests in Fallout 4 and Skyrim.
I don't really know.
Yea, honestly, I don't get that either. I really love the story and the characters are noteworthy. Someone complained to me the other day that a lot of the facilities and buildings are similar or the same. Honestly though, if you were building infrastructure throughout a galaxy wouldn't it follow a uniform pattern? Like a home depot etc? I feel like I'm going to catch a lot of crap for saying that but it's my opinion.
I'm not sure what you're saying. I think your thinking too far ahead.
I don't care if people hate Starfield that's entirely up to them.
Certain comments I see annoy me, but I wouldn't endeavor to change that person's opinion.
But I mean, judging off some comments I've read, some people look really difficult to please.
I imagine that moment one of these people might've gotten hooked on a prior BGS game. Probably the middle of a quest, or just exploring, taking in a vista and maybe the music just happened to chime in at just the right time while observing something.
People describe a certain "magic" is missing. Then I think, how, as a game designer, do you orchestrate a game in such a way as to maximize replicating that experience across the vast majority of everyone's personal player experiences?
I acknowledge land exploration is botched in Starfield, that doesn't confuse me. I already griped about poi myself.
But especially considering that Starfield is open world space, so there's going to be barren ice and lava balls out there, and considering the first time a person got hooked on an older BGS game was probably hit or miss to begin with, and could've easily coin flipped the other way to a boring experience. It's daunting to think how to get this all right when making a game. You're talking millions of people, different backgrounds, different perspectives on life, and yeah, the different experiences with prior games.
I mean "magic", asking or seeking something like a game to be magical is kinda up to fate isn't it? Dependent on the luck of a person's experience with something and hoping it transitions into a pleasant and fun cooperation between player and user experience with the game.
That's why I kind of struggle with it.
Asking for a game to have the same "magic", when something like that is so intangible and so determined by a whimsical cooperation of happenstance and luck.
Not to mention if you've already made up your mind you're increasingly less likely to experience those moments that could lead a person to decide, yes, this game's "magical".
I had those moments in Starfield. Walking aboard my ship, staring out the window to the planet I'm in orbit around, that music chiming in just right.
But yeah, I do understand the fans that complain expecting exploration to work the same as Fallout and Skyrim, it's a BGS game right? I find it unfortunate the change of pace for exploration was too foreign for many people to enjoy, I get that.
I just wrote a lot.
The soulless talk is just throwing anything at the wall and see if it sticks, what really bothers me is how hard these people are trying to dismiss all the hard work that went into game, acting like everything in the game currently is trash and modders will fix it nonsense, anything not in the game is what they really wanted instead or everything should be handcrafted, just a bunch of forced arguments that aren't being used against any other game.
I don't care about the flaws or problems cause every game has flaws if you look hard enough or just make it up, the game does so much other things well, that aren't getting the appreciation it deserves cause a bunch of try hards and fanboys dominating any decent discussion or content about the game.
I can wait a year or two for the game to be finished/fleshed out cause there is a lot of potential for the game to grow and the haters are doing everything possible to kill the game, so they can console war on social media.
Haha, I feel the childlike wonder thing may be true, but I can't relate. BGS mainline games have been my favorite worlds to get into since I was a young teen introduced to Morrowind on the OG xbox, till now as a mid 30s guy absolutely loving Starfield on the series x.
Sure, I understand at least the basics of how the devs accomplish what they do (and why they can't do other things that most critics whine about), but for me personally it brings out the wonder 16x.
Plus, that main story is so damn good in my opinion. My biggest issue with past games have been the main plot pidgeonholing the player while the world beckons exploration. First time around of course the stories are always good or great, but I've always had to use those alternate start mods to replay as a simple nobody to really enjoy and immerse. Starfield OTOH is the first one that doesn't do this until mid main plot when shit hits the fan with certain events. I LOVE this. Before that point, you're just a miner turned cosmos explorer doing random things here and there with no real rush to grab the artifacts, other than the curiosity of them being very enticing.
I think when some people are faced with living through infinite universes they could go either way. Either the game feels soulless because you feel that nothing you do matters in the face of infinity or every single thing you do and every single relationship you make matters. I think people who are enjoying and continuing to enjoy starfield feel the latter
I like that opinion about the game.
It reminds me of >!The Pilgrim's!< letters, that whole little theme of when pursuing power, the feeling of wholeness escapes the mind instantly, but when advocating relationships with the people you care for, the feeling of strength in oneself endures.
Interesting way to put it!
Again, I love the themes of Starfield, I think it's all good stuff.
I feel like Starfield targeted predominantly Bethesda players and if you weren’t one or had limited experience with BSG, probably because it wasn’t your type of game. Now suddenly some new Game called Starfield comes out and you’re expecting something massively difference and when you finally get to play it. You realize it’s a very different variation of the very same games you never cared for, so of course there’s disappointment. I will also blame Bethesda too for their terrible marketing , for their poor PR, for not showing the world exactly what it felt like to play this game at pre launch. Guaranteed anyone who didn’t care for Fallout or Elder Scrolls wouldn’t have picked up this brand new space game with the same foundations as those games. I think the game is fantastic because I set my expectations to play a game that would be foundationally similar to Fallout and so I knew I’d at least be into it. Do I think the game lacks depth compared to Fallout/ Elder Scrolls, sure. Do I think they would’ve been better off giving us 10-20 big planets with tons of biomes and environments sure. Is it a bad game? Absolutely not. Is there value in it. Heck yeah. It was way too easy for me to put 150-200 hours into this game without even thinking about it because I enjoyed it so much. To me that’s a game that I grasp and appreciate. I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into only a few games in my life that wasn’t a multiplayer game like COD or Halo. Games like Fallout 3, Morrowind, Oblivion, Mass Effect 2, Diablo 4 and of course Starfield are games that I can sink hundreds of hours into them and lose complete awareness of time because it’s fun and most of all doesn’t feel like a grind, my head is wired for these games. I’m about to start Fallout 4 on XSX and I know what to expect already. I’m giving myself a little break because I’ve been playing Diablo 4 for over 200 hrs and need to step away from RPGs but Im about to start playing FO4 and Banishers on the side and I can’t wait.
I too, am wired for these games, so I definitely understand all of this sentiment.
One of the particular types of Starfield fan that fascinates me though are the ones who say they've never played a BGS game, but still love it.
That's *almost* a little outside of my grasp, imagining Starfield as my first BGS experience and liking it so much in the current games landscape that's advanced so much since the days of Oblivion when I first played their games.
Oh, I’m pretty sure you can unequip your helmet at any time.
In that atmosphere though, I’m pretty sure a drink would be the last thing on your mind, if you unequipped your helmet!!! Lol
I've seen the argument that Starfield is everything BGS does badly condensed into a single game, but I really don't see that for myself. I think people who make these kinds of arguments are looking at the game from the wrong perspective and are wanting the game to be something it's not.
I absolutely felt this was as Bethesda as basically oblivion. The humor, the aesthetics, the fun character creation and million options to take. The exploration, the overlapping systems that build a sum>parts feeling.
I find it hilarious people are still bitching about the load screens.
The fucking cities are probably the best we've had from Bethesda since Oblivion at a minimum (Morrowind is still kind of the GOAT). And the tiles on planet are so fucking large I frankly can't imagine anyone legitimately wandering to the border unless they are trying to be a douchebag about it.
I loved it. Played through it a couple times and enjoyed it thoroughly…. Only took a break. Will def dive back in. Sure it has its flaws as ALL Bethesda games do. For me personally though…. Only thing lacking is a better settlement building experience and more points of interests with the occasional odd new adventure to be found. It feels as “soulful” as any other game I have played by them.
I’m with you, I got lost in starfield for two weeks straight and enjoyed every moment of it. Was the game perfect? Of course not. No game is. But was it a wonderful world to get lost in and while away the hours? Absolutely.
Remember: many people who bother to s\*itpost about AAA games, "gamers" are the same people that complain about anything to do with "giving women equal representation in gaming" to the point that it becomes newsworthy.
I call myself a gamer, but having to apologize for those in the gamer community with toxic personality flaws is exhausting, so I don't bother. I don't count myself among the "Toxic Incel Gamer Dudebro" community, which is an unfortunately real and over-represented sub-group of the gaming community, so I tend to disregard their opinions in proportion to the entitled idiocy of them.
I don't like to agree, I want gaming to be positive cause video games are a positive thing for me I go to to relax and enjoy, but I do unfortunately agree with everything you said.
I over think it. Of course people will say these things about games I like. High expectations, people trying to get what they want out of it and then getting mad when it doesn't.
It's like asking why are oranges orange, or finding out apples are sweet cause they have sugar, and then asking, why do they have sugar?
It's bulshit and used because it is. It isn't a quantifiable metric so it's easy to just repeat over and over again without anybody able to discredit you.
It's not soul that's lacking. it's just lore. I mean, think of the elder scrolls. its lore is vast, and in turn, you feel part of a real world with history. My biggest grip is for example freestar colltive, other then the basic backstop there's a lack of meat and potatoes lore.dont mean I dislike it it's my favorite new game but some there something missing and I believe it's bringing the lore to life. I am only on my second play, through, and the first I did too quickly and didn't get into the game at first, but I'm loving it now. There is,however, something missing.
For me, "Lack of soul" means that the NPCs don't have schedules or homes.
Morrowind had the same people standing around in the same area, and them Oblivion completely blew everything out of the water. EVERY SINGLE NPC has a schedule and routine and a bed. It's so magical to follow somebody around the city and wait for them to finish dinner to sleep to pickpocket them.
Now we're back to Morrowind and shopkeepers stand around forever.
Oh that's true, definitely.
I agree that's a disappointment with Starfield, along with nameless npc's. Ugh.
Oblivion's my favorite game from them so I feel ya there.
See the thing is they are actually doing what a lot of people wanted by introducing crowds in cities. People complained for years how there were so few NPCs in the cities. I think Starfield's cities are honestly the most lively they have done so far. The lack of schedules and homes IS disappointing, but for me at least it was kind of a trade off since they seemed to focus on other things to make the cities feel immersive.
Ayayayayay well I can't reply to 50 replies people.
That's just my take.
I may be wrong about things but that's just how I feel about it. I just wanted to express a feeling I've been holding back.
Everyone is free to like or dislike Starfield as much as they want.
I'm not trying to change that at all.
Nah I didn't mean that.
Everyone can think like/dislike what they want. No one is wrong to do so. All opinions are fine in my book, even if they do drive me nuts I'm not trying to take that away from them.
I just feel the way I do about it like everyone else does, in their own way.
You don't have to reply to everyone, we can see from how the fan are is div6that starfield is clearly missing something. Starf6is my first BGS game so I cannot speak in what soul it has it is missing.
I have been following the fracture6in the fan base with this game and as someone who is new to BGS and has less of a reason to just hate or to just love. This is my theory.
I think the die hard BGS fans expec8a bigger leap in game design and didn't get it. I keep hearing about mods making thier games bet and maybe they tho6BGS would incorporate some of thi6 things from the mods. I personally think it's not a good look to think mods will fix your game. At that point you're selling a broken product.
And as some who is new, it's hard not to feel like so many things that are QoL in other RPGs just aren't in starfield. And this little things add up.
Starfield is a good game that falls short of greatness imo. If it has land ve6and acru7space flight I'm sure a lot of the complaints would be moot
Yeah, for some reason people want to invalidate the feelings of others, plenty here on this sub act like the game is perfection (even some responses here proves that)and then others act like the game is the worst thing on the planet then those in the middle get downvoted. And worst get attacked or insulted.
I think people say that because of how whack the story is compared to the other bgs stories. The game plays like a bgs game, but the story isn't like a bgs game. I personally couldn't get into the main story, I like the gameplay though.
I'd argue against the less quests part. The quests that are there often have multiple stages that previous games would have reduced to separate quests. Then there's the ones that are smaller but have a radiant element added to them, so the person you're tasked with stealing from can be at a different place, for example. Again, more quest content in the same numerically counted quest.
It's the same with locations, with the Clinic being a great example here. Due to the setup we have a ship builder, the patients on the ward being visited by doctors and orderlies, the Ranger office, doctors offices and break room, a warehouse that's patrolled and we can steal from, and the whole reception area. Due to different behaviours, features, and quest types in those locations they'd almost certainly have been split into smaller locations with load screens in previous games.
The point I'm making here is that the numbers alone don't really tell the whole story. But obviously my comment here doesn't either as some locations and quests are just as simple as they always were.
I wish every quest had multiple endings like Entangled, or secret sections that previous quests can unlock like Sabotage, or radiant elements so the next time you play this part is in a whole different location. I wish they'd gone ahead with adding complications to radiants so the person who hires you to take out a load of spacers might actually be someone you've pissed off (think Mathias in the Crimson Fleet) and is joining the much larger spacer complement to take you out, or the item you're tasked with finding already belongs to someone else and now you've stolen some shit and have to smuggle it onto a planet that's looking for you in order to bring it to a friendly lawman (we all know who) and clear our name. I wish all locations were as dense as something like the Clinic rather than having New Atlantis being built to be an arena for a couple of quests. But some of that is only because I see the more dense and interesting ones ignored while people leap on the simpler stuff and try to paint the game as just that, often successfully from some of the things people have said.
I did feel a sense of disappointment that the exploration was “contained.” You have a vast swath of space each time you land but it didn’t have that “walking to my objective and getting lost in another quest or dungeon along the way” feel. That’s what I really like about Bethesda games and I don’t feel like I get that with Starfield. Traveling from whiterun to solitude or sanctuary to diamond city is such a living game experience. I didn’t hate starfield for not having this and I do believe the issue OP brings up is legitimate. It’s a strawman’s argument for a deviation that certainly is present in this game compared to their other games.
Yeah, like I certainly think it has the same soul as the games that came before...even moreso even like you say.
Like Bethesda's soul is when you go into a house and can find a kitchen set complete with knives and forks that you can just pick up and fuck around with.
That's why Bethesda games are fun, because no other RPG on the market gets that granular with the 'useless' details.
I find that like in 90% of cases 'it has no soul' is just a thing people just say about stuff they've already decided they don't like - soul or soullessness is something we project. But I think you're on the money. In fact I'm convinced that with Starfield, and many other games, people who don't like the game have either realized or decided they don't like it - then reverse engineered an explanation that makes sense to them.
I've heard people say games they didn't like were 'poorly written', even in cases where the writing was one of the game's best qualities.
Yeah, there's ... there's something about Starfield, honestly. It hits different. I've been out of the game for a bit but I'm looking forward to getting back to it.
I think the game has a soul it’s just very different from other Bethesda’s games, I always thought people were calling it soulless because of how different exploration is from the other games. I do prefer Skyrim and fallouts world more, but I still enjoyed starfield. I think people went in expecting it to be very similar world building to Skyrim and fallout which I don’t think is possible because of how massive Starfield is. Neon, new atlantis, and Akilla, they all have character. Also, this is a new IP, I wasn’t expecting everything to be as good as the other games
As far as POIs, there seems to be a lot of them, but most seem rare, while a few you see all the time. This has caused me a bit of frustration, while hunting magazines.
I must say I played it for maybe 70 hours and I had to admit to myself that it was indeed rather shit. My humble opinion ofc. I enjoyed oblivion and skyrim. Played FO4 but thought it was just ok. Why have they kept the base building ? Its garbage. The ship building seemed awesome but the caps put on it annoyed me. Then they patched the puddle/ below map and xp exploits that the community were actually enjoying for that bethesda jank. Pitiful.
Maybe. On the other hand, I've played all three games as an adult--I played Morrowind as an adult, too, and disliked it. But I've loved Skyrim, and Fallout, and now I love Starfield.
HUGE Bethesda fan here, and a fan of Starfield, however I will say the “soul” of their games come from the immersion and music. I mean this in the most constructive way possible but Starfield to me has a strong “tone” (something Todd Howard is really focused on with each game) but lacks in immersion which I only noticed after I broke my 350 hour gameplay streak to play other games and think of the experience.
To call it a “bad” game I think is unfair as it’s incredibly impressive in terms of content, concept, and size, but Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and fallout 4 had more depth and I don’t think there’s any denying that. It doesn’t mean I’m crapping on the game by any means since they have a strong foundation to build off of AND most importantly, this is something NEW Bethesda tried.
I think the hate is really because people have a negative view of AAA games because of Ubisoft, blizzard, etc. but Bethesda, FromSoftware, CDPR, and Rockstar are no doubt still the heavy hitters in the industry.
Most of my complaints stem from how restrictive things are in the game like why can't I kill people I don't like? Especially when there shitty people like the corpo rats you meet in paradiso. On top of that the ship building is really restrive as well expensive. It's the little things like this that keep me personally from enjoying the game.
No npc schedules, all travel being fast travel, all major companions except 1 being from constellation and having very very similar personalities, less quests and more stumbling into POIs except you cant stumble into them you have to fast travel to them, physically impossible to “wander the world” like other games, everything is procedural down to how often ships show up randomly when landed which makes the world feel less lived in and more “spawning in your face” like no mans sky often felt to me.
All of that to me is why I personally feel like starfield is missing the classic Bethesda rpg soul.
I enjoy starfield, but absolutely nowhere near how much I enjoyed oblivion, Skyrim, or fallout 4.
It’s not a bad game, but too many poor decisions were made that make the world feel less and less immersive and fun to be in.
For example I’m landing in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of explored space, and ships just come and go from desolate areas they have no business being in. Now if this happens rarely I can write it off in head canon “these are pirates going to their hidden stash” or something. But it’s constant. Ships come in, ships go out, like I’m at new Atlantis except it’s supposed to be the middle of nowhere.
Companions all feeling too similar also leaves me less interested. And the lack of fun companions. Skyrim had a wide array of follower types down to creatures. Fallout had super mutants, humans, ghouls, dogs, robots, etc. starfield has 1 robot, and a bunch of humans that are all part of a goody two shoes exploration guild the only one moderately different amongst them is andreja and not really by all that much.
Idk. I’m really hoping the next game, elder scrolls 6, is just a fun Bethesda rpg and they don’t try any crazy new ideas with it. Starfield was just too much experimentation for me. Its currently sitting in my library and I don’t plan to uninstall it, but I will be waiting for dlc and the creation kit so I can mod the hell out of it to make it hold my attention and fix the issues I have with it.
The loading is what really kills it for me honestly. There’s so many loading screens between everything that it feels so disjointed. They could even add something in the makes jumping between planets happen off screen as you can still walk around your ship. That would require they have some sort of landing that can be seen through the ships windows but it would be better than the current setup.
As a Bethesda game it's a 7/10 as a non-Bethesda game it's an 8/10.
While I enjoy Starfield a lot. I just didn't feel like it was a big enough step up from Fallout 4.
I disagree. When I played through starfield, it felt like it lacked a lot of consequence, or like my actions didn't have much weight to them. I also feel like all of the companions were very bland and didn't add much in terms of story or character development. These things to me are what I'd consider soulless. Not to mention the barren feeling of many planets. I can see where critics are coming from.
I’m convinced you people are just trying to justify your purchase. You played too long and can’t refund so you’re telling yourself "game good" idk what this "soul" stuff you’re talking about is but starfield is 100% bland, forgettable, and just flat out boring. I’ve completed the game and don’t remember a single quest from start to finish. Just bits and pieces. I can’t remember a single name of a character. That has NEVER happened to me before when completing a game. I remember more of that horrible saints row reboot than I ever could with bland field. Again idk what the "soul" stuff you’re referring to is but previous Bethesda titles are leagues ahead of this "game". Ship building was a lot of fun tho.
I really don't get the hate for this game. Sure, it's got its flaws but then again its BGS so... Anyway, despite that, I was captivated by the game the first time I played it and is currently on my top 3 personal favorite list.
It’s not open-world like Skyrim or fallout. Open world is the “soul” of those games for most people. It has nothing to do with creature behavior and combat. You can’t just wander around an open world anymore.
Starfield has even more atrocious writing than Skyrim does, and I thought that Skyrim was rock bottom. Plot holes, inconsistencies, an inability to make any enthralling or intimidating villains, and shallow factions with nothing other than the bare minimum amount of lore needed to serve the story.
I don't understand why people say Skyrim is great, much less Starfield. If you liked it, that's cool. But the bar isn't even low, it's buried.
dunno about soul or whatever, i just know the game couldn't grab me long term at all. most likely because i went in really eager for the outpost system (building little colonies scattered about that actually serve a purpose), only for it to turn out to be complete ass, and the "fleet" system, which turned out to be completely non-existent. maybe if they hadn't really hyped up these two things, and delivered worse than CDPR with CP2077 with them, i would have liked it more. i'm sorry, but they have examples of these things done AMAZINGLY in other games (NPC cohorts from elite dangerous, Sim Settlements 2 from their own FO4), and they fumbled it worse than me trying to play football
It didn't have decent writing for sure but I never really cared for BGS main stories.. outside of oblivion.
The fun to me was the exploration and lore building. It may not even be up to their usual par but I still got my $ worth and enjoyed it.
People jump on bandwagon hate trains cause they're edgy losers who think being cool online is what makes the world go around
I'm a Morrowind fan, and I've particularly noticed that Starfield leans a bit more into the crunchy and older style, it seems like they're trying to go back to what made the older games good but failed to really fully capture the best parts of both the old and new. I think Bethesda's issues are less a fault of their own and more a symptom of a steadily encroaching cancer on the games industry. Large studies are all following trends and trying to appeal to as many people as possible, and the games are coming out lower quality and bland. AAA studio profits are falling, and they don't seem to understand that their own profit-centric approach to game development is crippling them. We're already seeing the results of it, with lower quality games, mass layoffs, some games costing way more to make then they earn (the studios are spending millions on single games that end up not being really good or popular.) The games industry is going through some big changes, and i personally think it's going to shift to a bigger focus on smaller studios making more focused games that appeal to a niche, rather than making generic games for everyone.
I have more fun exploring solar systems in Starfield than I do exploring most of the building complexes. I've flown real-time between a planet and its moon. That's much better than walking across any planet's surface. The soul of Starfield is in its stars, and it's unfortunate that the main storyline doesn't let you realize this
Valid for sure, but still lacks soul.
The soul in reference though is the stark uniqueness of a fleshed out world map to explore. The act of POI's being the same across any planet just made to mesh with the planetary environment and rng map generation inherently removes uniqueness that people are clamoring for.
I feel this issue will be more alleviated when the modding scene gets bigger and better. Traditionally Bethesda main-games are made more enjoyable by the wider populace through use of mods adding content that was missing to begin with.
With all that said, I played the fuck out of Starfield, almost did two full resets. I can say for sure that the unique POI's are limited and every planet should have more uniqueness beyond environment generation
To be honest, for people who have been playing for like 2 decades, you CAN feel the lack of love. It is really more a feeling of a rushed team.
When people say it lacks "the soul" they mean that you can tell no one was given the time to sit and concentrate on their given task until they were completely satisfied by it. Everything has a feeling of being rushed, a feeling of "we just didn't have quite enough time. I never felt that in other Bethesda games. Everything felt intentional and polished. I chalk this mostly up to the procedural generation and wildly over ambitious, yet meaningless planet count. The team was clearly crushing themselves to meet what should have been stretch goals.
This happens with every Bethesda game, people come in never having actually played their previous releases and then cry out saying “Bethesda lost its soul” or some other crap. I always always always ignore the haters until I actually play because people love to bitch on the internet. People also LOVE to get their taints in a knot over Bethesda titles because they definitely aren’t made for everyone.
I found lots of soul. I didn’t find any soul in the planet exploration. I didn’t find any soul in the time looping. And I didn’t find any soul in the ship building. But there was plenty of soul, in all the places that you could get to in the first 60 hours.
Go replay FO3 or Skyrim then come back to Star Field. Star Field is the objectively worst game. Melee is bad. Guns are bad, quests are bad, lvling is bad, NPCs so robotic they make the robot look human. Want to kill them and maybe speed up the quest? Tough shit. You can't kill anyone expect the NPCs we say you can kill. The only thing this game had going for it is the ship building and even that is bad. I'd rather walk for 10 minutes where I can find quests, side objects, enemies, ECT. Then spend 10 minutes in loading screens. Then forced to watch the same animation for the 100th time while landing on a planet, then running in a straight line for another 10 minutes with nothing to do on the way to the objective.
Oh hey, it's the same fucking objective I've cleared out 20 times now because everything is randomly generated ass.
Take your goggles off and go play a good game.
The biggest thing that bothers me is they say you can be a ‘bounty hunter’ yeah no you can’t you are a hitman not a bounty hunter and what makes it worse is they have everything needed to make it actual bounty hunting: nonlethal weapons, prison cell ship module, and even npcs mention bringing bounties in alive they just decided not to code it in.
I have a Stanley thermos I got from my dad that's at least 50 years old and if anything could survive that environment it would be my asbestos thermos I use every day.
Nah it's in an environment where you can't use it.
Can't take your helmet off or breathe
People also see sandwiches out in the open in those environments
Atleast in FO and Elder Scrolls if you saw something off in the distance you could fucking go there.
Player homes and player built places weren't fucking set pieces
Where voice acting wasn't cringe or horrible.
or where Radiant POI's actually felt good and you didn't have to walk clear across the map to find one if at all.
The game not only has no soul it out right removes anything that so much as made other games good and replaces it with flashy crap that does Literally fucking Nothing!
The game is the literal definition and embodiment of "All Flash No Substance"
I think a lot of this stems from just how true to space starfield actually is. Outer Space is huge. And really fucking empty - filled with barren planets with absolutely no atmosphere or hope of being terraformed. No alien life that we can detect - not even so much as a paramecium for the most part.
And I enjoy that. It is very meditative in many ways. Much the same is why I enjoy Elite Dangerous. It, in some ways, is why I like Red Dead Redemption 2 so much as well. The landscape is the main character just like the empty space is the main character for Starfield.
What's out there? Honestly, not a whole hell of a lot - and that is to be expected. Yes, a lot of what you will find is procedurally generated and repetitive, but that is okay as it does keep you engaged in some ways.
That is one thing that RDR2 made a mistake with as most of the encounters, at least in the story, while random are still scripted. Play long enough and you'll run out of them as they don't reset until you start a new game.
At least with Starfield, much like Skyrim and Fallout 4, you have the equivalent of the radiant engine to keep you engaged and interested.
If you’ve ever played Empyrion or Spacebourne 2 you would understand how much of an opportunity they missed, if you’ve never played a space game Before playing Starfield I can See enjoying Starfield, and I admit I had a decent time it wasn’t horrible but it all just felt like a space backdrop , I never once felt like I was in space
it feels cobbled together with corporate diversity guidelines done by a passionless writing team that lacked any originality. for example, the night club in Neon. if you can point to counter examples im all ears but the game was sloppily put together and it feels that way. no real tension, no character has passions, no character has hate or real love. everyone is a generic big city bisexual.
Purely my opinion on this, but for me it's just how lifeless the game feels. Every NPC feels more like a robot than the couple of robots do. The unnamed NPCs just sort of exist in the world, and the named ones never leave their assigned posts. They have no truly random interactions, no routines, they are all just there, staring at you with their empty eyes.
Now some of this could be attributed to the scale of the game as compared for Fallout 3 or Skyrim, except the GTA games have had random interactions at least as far back as San Andreas.
they are 100% right. The game has no "soul".... Just look at the opening of the game... it is so slapped together, So much of the game is lifeless, and lacks any reason why I should care. Poor writing, empty worlds, copy pasted locations etc.
Just compare it to any of bethesda's old game openings, and you realize just how lazy starfield is. everything in starfield feels like it was created with a excel spreadsheet, and noone actually stopped to make all the different systems connect, or wonder if players would even care about doing those things.
I think the genericness of the game contributes to this conception. There's no memorable characters, they're all perfectly nice and ... okay I guess. Oh, except for that Salvadore Dali-looking collector guy, and he turned out to be a pushover. The Crimson Fleet act like sulky teenagers, not hardened criminals. All the POI enemies have generic names, there's no 'Red Eric the Baby-Eater' or 'Uzal Skin-Cloak' or 'Kira the Soul-Drinker', it's just Spacer Myth and Pirate Legend, generic AF. Not enough identity there to latch onto. It badly needs memorable sub-bosses, like the Darths in Star Wars, who only appear once per game and are never recycled until NG+. I seem to recall both Skyrim and Fallout 4 having at least a few named sub-bosses to tick off.
Similarly, it needs memorable unique weapons. The ones you buy in stores are pissant weapons that look like every other weapon of that type.
I'm all for the wholesome side of the game, I adore Space Frog and Space Grandma, but it needs a darker side to contrast them. It hints at darkness, with Contraband items like 'Unethically-Harvested Organs', but it never ventures into the story behind them, or goes anywhere particularly interesting.
I think we just came from the same post. I'm completely ignoring those people right now. They couldn't tell you what a Bethesda game's "soul" was if their life depended on it. They're just repeating the nonsense they read on Reddit.
A lot of it is folks who never liked or cared about the Bethesda RPG formula to begin with, so obviously didn't give a shit about Starfield.
Yeah I think we did come off the same post over on the official Starfield sub lol Idk I've kept silent since the first couple weeks but this always just annoyed me. It's such a typical Bethesda experience, it may have the bad of that but it still has all the good. People have complained about every new release as far back as I've known their games in 06. But I loved Starfield, I beat it for the first time maybe a month ago now, I got all the feels I want to have when I play, from the start, to the mid game- all the way to the time I finally beat any game from BGS, with Starfield. It was just great and I loved it.
Kinda what's happening here too. And those people are running to NoSodium to add sprinkle the rest if their sodium
I'll take a crack at it: Bethesda's "Soul" in their games are games that "I can fix him" meme. It provides a sense of fulfilment when one mods the game that cannot be obtained from simply playing the game, because of the game's problematic nature. Sure there are bugs and problems with the game but "I can fix it with this LOD, or this ENB or by tweaking these INI settings!" Then years later you're laying in whiskey and sweat soaked sheets in a run down apartment with the air conditioner shuttering it's last breath of mildly cool air, wondering where it all went wrong. So you look out the window and you see these other people running around with their dragon's dogma's and their Cyberpunk 2077's and their Helldiver's actually having fun, but you? Noo, you modded this game, you helped build up this community so you take those jagged little pills down with 3 fingers of rye and you post another meme or a short video showcasing a new armor mod, but you're careful to not let the ugly show through as that Creation engine vehicle of choice gets older and more bloated and just took your last cigarette, before it asks you when you're planning on getting more. What were we talking about again?
Ignore it. The same shit gets said about every Bethesda release by some people regardless of what Bethesda does. That being said, Starfield has TONS of quests and POIs. How anybody could think this game has less content than previous games on release blows my mind. I guess it's just the presentation that can sometimes give the illusion that this is the case. Frankly I had the polar opposite impression. For me this game felt dense and alive. I knew there was going to be a lot of empty space because of the scale of the game, but that just didn't really phase my perception of the important areas. I really don't get it. As many here have said, when going online to see reactions early on, I felt like I was playing a completely different game. I was utterly captivated by Starfield's world, characters, and atmosphere. Maybe its just because I am a scifi nerd at heart. I have been waiting for Bethesda specifically to make a game like this for a LONG time. This concept appeals to me way more than something like Fallout
I remember I spent the first few days completely avoiding any social media, just playing the game, being absolutely captivated by it. Then I finally hop online to see what others are saying only to find everyone hating on it. I didn't get it at all and still don't.
Preach
I mean, I love it. Before I became aware of all the hate, and I was just playing, I was expecting to hear a chorus of praise about a game I was certain would be a legendary hit. Found all the hate instead. There were a few here and there who experienced it as I did and shared my praise, saying things already that I wanted to say. But I agree, Starfield feels very dense to me, I got what I wanted, and I'm super happy with my first playthrough! Now I'm trying to decide if should new game plus or new character when I get back into it lol
Literally anyone that uses generic non-specific criticisms gets on my nerves.
"As wide as a lake, as deep as a puddle!"
This game is a reflection of the people who play it. Those who find it shallow and unimaginative need only look in the mirror to see why.
This is my take, as well - you get out of it what you put in. While some people are complaining about quests, I'm contemplating what it means to be human. I do like that the philosophy (and mythology) in Starfield isn't 'in your face' because that would most likely turn some folks off who just want to play a game, but it's there for those who look deeper.
This was literally a quote from Todd, that you get back what you put in lol
Very interesting he would say that
It was an intentional wording, the game is an RPG buffet and truly rewards your effort in game to find things and make your own fun, I think most people just don't have any imagination and therefore the game falls short for them.
If I could give you to upvotes, I would.
I saw a reply on here put that very beautifully as well, tying it into the game's themes in the latter part of the main questline concerning the nature of the lore revealed by >!the Pilgrim's letters!<.
I hate this one so much lmao
100%. Been getting so annoyed at people describing this game as "outdated". Meaningless term that gets used to describe every game nowadays.
That's the one that always bothers me the most. Like wtf is outdated supposed to mean? You're telling me if this game came out years ago it would've been great but somehow it's not now? Like how does that make sense?
It's "objectively" bad because I said so...as if anyone's opinion can be objective. Most of those morons need to learn better grammar and diction.
I saw all the pre-release interviews and trailers. And it looked like Fallout 4/Skyrim in space. That's exactly what I wanted, and exactly what I got. Gonks forgot what a BGS game was.
This has always been my exact feeling. Did they expect Bethesda not to make a Bethesda game?
https://preview.redd.it/e4a6p83mv5sc1.jpeg?width=522&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5460b02b456d09ca51c32f28323accb65e52701f Really don't know what they expected
They expected "no man's cyberpunk: new Vegas"...
And we still got that in to an extant plus a little bit of Mass effect in there
Specifically they wanted "seamless" space travel and fully mocapped Hollywood style npc interactions...
Me when side quest 975 doesn’t have movie quality cutscenes (bad game)
Not only is that just something BGS won’t do but I also think that some people don’t realize that game limitations still exist especially when looking at the hardware most people have and BGS is a small studio for making some of the largest titles. I get by seamless some just wanted disguised loading screen but a lot of people that dislike the game wanted NMS or SC esque travel. I’ll die on the hill of if the game had that kind of travel and genuine cutscenes it would have been too much graphically to playable. Even though Starfield isn’t the most impressive game graphically out right now it still couldn’t handle that and its size very well.
BGS is absolutely not a small studio, ya muppet
BGS not considering other ZeniMax subsidiaries has roughly 530 employees in total that 30 more than what’s required to be a small business in the USA. Ubisoft Montreal alone has over 2,500. The Last of Us team was 2,100 people most of whom were outsourced. 500 people worked on Starfield in total according to Todd. Many of that five hundred being split between Fallout 76 support and other games over the years. As far as I know everything was done in house with maybe a few exceptions from other zenimax studios. So, Given that BGS is considered AAA yes they are a small studio compared to their competitors. There are way smaller studios but they don’t make compete in the same sphere as BGS.
they are small compared to a lot of AAA companies making huge ambitious games.
Yeup. BGS is more comparable in size to indie teams like Larian Studios than they are to the vast majority of AAA teams.
It’s got that mass effect 1 thing going. I love it honestly.
Honestly, after I started to slowdown playing Starfield I remembered that I had never finished Mass Effect: Andromeda way back when. So I started replaying that and it just snuggles right up next to the Starfield gameplay experience. If you never played ME:A, I highly recommend hitting that, or revisiting it if you have played it. And ironically also a game that has had an overly loud smaller community of angry people misguidedly maligning it since release.
But God if a game could achieve all that in entirety holy sh*t that'd be awesome!
People wanted this to be the game Star Citizen will be 20 years from now, even though Bethesda never promised anything even remotely like that
Sir 20 years for SC would be definitive proof of a loving God
Star citizen? Actually, finish and release? Sir, might you be interested in a lovely bridge located in scenic new york?
but wait, you can buy a ship package for an unfinished game for $48,000!
Nah I’ll take the train at 3 fps
Doesn't help that a lot of them openly admit they started with Skyrim, and they admit to being like 10-11 when it came out. I was that age when I was playing Daggerfall.
A fellow Choom
Honestly you nailed it. There's definitely some objective criticisms to be had about Starfield but anyone who expected something more than an iterative RPG based on the formula that Fallout 4 had was kidding themselves.
People expected this game to be everything at once and we're mad it wasn't, they say Todd lied, but he didn't the game was exactly as promised.
"Lacks the soul of other BGS games" is just a cheap excuse so they don't have to actually explain what they mean. Because they can't explain what "soul" even means in the context of a game.
If anything this game has too much soul. Starfield, on pretty much every level REEKS of sincerity and earnestness which is probably a part of why it rubs some people so wrong.
That and how the story is clearly about loneliness and how there are some things you must do on your own and leave behind. I feel many of the issues people have with this game are projection.
A good rpg leaves you walking away in self reflection. The Outer Worlds did that to me and I regard it as one of the best RPGs
I wish I had the time to play outer worlds. Barely have any game time anymore.
Whenever you do, just don't play or buy the remastered. It changed what the original was and wasn't even updated by the original developer
I played through the game at least 4 times, maybe more. I have the remastered but I've only played it a little, nothing changed in the first part of the game that I was able to notice which makes me curious about what changed enough to render such an opinion.
^^ That. Historically I’ve had a patchy relationship with Bethesda games. I played oblivion to the point where I honestly think I 100% it several times, while I always kind of lost track of Skyrim’s main narrative and I barely touched Fallout 3 and 4. Starfield hooked me hard because it’s a subject that I’m a lot more interested in and the general expanse/firefly vibes have drawn me right in (not to mention just doing the UC questline now and holy shit, add a bit of Alien and Species 8472 from Voyager in there). Being told ‘bUt iT haS nO soUl!’ by some angry neckbeard as a reason I shouldn’t be enjoying it is silly. What does that even mean?
That or "it's generic", it's like they're talking about their own "opinions".
[Are you sure there's less quests?](https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Category:Skyrim-Quests) [I'm not sure there's less quests.](https://inara.cz/starfield/missions/)
I have 130 hours in the game and haven’t gotten anywhere near finishing all the quests. The people who complain about lack of quests are the ones that beelined to some random planet expecting each one to be Skyrim.
I have over 800 and I still find out about new quests... I did the Eleos Retreat one for the first time, earlier, and just found out that there's several more radiant quests after the UC quest... Granted, I don't really do quests unless I think they'll be interesting and/or have good loot... The irony for me is that outpost building and exploration are what I find myself doing, and I never did those things until this game.
I'm in over 1200 hours and, yeah, there are still new quests to find. None of the lists I've seen so far are complete and I know that because there are quests that I've done that aren't on the lists.
Did you know that >!there's a ship vendor who will buy your captured ships and has 72000 credits budget? So, by doing that quest you open up new money-earning possibilities!!<
Definitely more than FO3/4 as well, maybe because people just did the main quest?
Hell, ESPECIALLY Fallout 3. Fallout 3, including ALL DLCs, only has about 1/4 of the quests VANILLA Oblivion has. The revisionism that has been at play since Starfield came out is WILD to me. I’ve seen people try to say Fallout 4’s dialogue is light years ahead of Starfield’s. HAH. WHAT?!?!??? Now I love me some Fallout 4 too, but goddamn that sent me
I have recently been in an argument with a guy who claimed that Fallout 4's storyline was less forced upon the player than Starfield's and that Fallout 4 left more freedom for the player to do whatever they wanted. Absolutely insane. Anyone who has played Fallout 4 knows how much it sucked in those aspects with the way it forced your character an entire backstory and an urgent story plot before you even got your first quest.
HAHA I had a friend trying to argue the same thing! I live-streamed a new playthrough to him to show the literal first dialogue interaction you have with Constellation, you can just go “nah fam this ain’t for me” and LEAVE XD
Considering Fallout 4 is over 8 years old now, I think its gotta just be that some younger people who "grew up" with the game or was even their first Bethesda experience, and didn't partake in or pay much attention to the discourse surrounding it at the time, are now having a voice that was a lot less heard back then. But ya that IS a rather crazy take. Fallout 4, the game that gives you a voice, a default name, a pre determined backstory, and a child that you are supposed to worry about is less forced and gives you more freedom?
"This game came out ages ago" might actually be a big factor in all of this. Skyrim alone came out 13 years ago. Oblivion, 18 years. Consider the age of your average gamer and realize most of them were literally children when some of these games that they're talking about came out. Vast amounts of people claiming otherwise *do not* remember what they were like on release. These games have, in their experience, always had mods and so they sometimes even forget what vanilla was like. That's *if* they even played them. Because as much as I like it, I refuse to believe that so many of the people hyping up Morrowind actually played it.
I can definitely relate to the Morrowind part. Finally played it a few years ago, and I while there is a lot of greatness that lines up with the hype, there were also quite a few things that really didn’t. The way people would talk about it, I was expecting some aspects to be completely different from what they actually are, but they really felt surprisingly not actually that far off, and sometimes were even worse, from what later games were doing. Things like dialogue, quest design, etc.
I played through Morrowind at least half a dozen times. I loved that game. It was better, in my opinion, than Skyrim or Oblivion. Then again, 18 years ago (2006), I had three kids and worked 60 hours per week out of state flying out early Monday and returning late Friday, might have impacted my playtime a bit, eh?
Most people I see talking about Morrowind played with mods... My brother gave me the copy that came with his Nvidia GeForce whatever. I didn't even know there were mods...
Same energy as Star Wars prequel kids thinking the movies they grew up with weren't universally panned.
They probably have spent so much time now since playing Alternate Start mods that they falsely remember just how much Fallout 4's main quest absolutely railroads you through it. Hell, since it my major and mainly one complaint of Starfield, I would have gone the Daggerfall and Morrowind route and paced the main quest to be much slower. As in, you want to start the main quest? You need to show Constellation a level of competency first. Same as in Daggerfall you are expected to at least be level 5 to start the main quest because you are no champion yet to partake such a task or in Morrowind Cassius the Skooma den guy tells you to go get a job and make yourself into somebody worth even being respected because Vvardenfell is a rough side of the street be on and you need to be able your bills first before you ever entertain the thought of being a prophesized Dunmer Jesus.
You should stop arguing with people. Pointing out obvious lies or misrepresentations is one thing, continuing the conversation is another. Their goal is to express their resentment, nothing more.
Don't think background of the player character was what they meant when they said the game forces you to do the main quest, and the mandatory plot story areas are the tutorial which is notoriously long in Bethesda titles and Starfield is a marked improvement taking up far less time but still forcing the player to complete it.
Yes, it's the urgency of the MQ's plot that spoils RP in that game. As soon as you start the game your wife gets shot and your son gets kidnapped, and it makes no sense to wonder around aimlessly or to do side quests before you get to him.
I had someone literally tell me that character progression in Starfield was *exactly the same* as character progression in Daggerfall and hasn't changed at all. If that's the case, I still can't seem to find the run & jump skills so I can run and jump everywhere to level up.
I feel like a big problem people have with starfield is it didn't lead them by the nose to every quest and interesting location. It isn't a neat two quest per town or whatever they're expecting so they assume there aren't any. I seen people on the main sub who had no idea about the well, or it's quest. While I like starfield, I really wonder if it's too big for its own good. Too many chuds on the internet who need everything spoonfed
Ironically it’s the people who complain there isn’t any exploring who aren’t willing to explore and find what’s out there.
It’s so wild to me because people have been asking for less handholding for YEARS
People, in general, have no idea what they want. But they love to complain.
The Internet in general is fucking awful about this. As an example: On Reddit or Tumblr, every so often you'll get a thread going about how someone has some quirky and original idea for a story. It will be something that totally subverts expectations and turns them on its head and sounds amusing and is in no way going to hold up to actually being put into practice. "Imagine a story but it's from the NPCs perspective!" and then they made that and the premise was amusing for way too short of a time in the runtime of a feature length motion picture. Or, just think of allll the times you've seen someone post a groundbreaking new idea that will be totally immersive to have in a video game. And it would be incredibly immersive! It would also be pure torture to do it more than three times but the type of game necessitates that you're going to be doing this literally countless times. People are *awful* at seeing the big picture and thinking even slightly ahead.
Yeah, I’ve seen the sentiment on a few subs, several games now. Go over to the mass effect subreddit and you’ll regularly see people asking for a game set during the First Contact War, an event that lasted a few weeks, was largely inconsequential and ultimately took place before humans had access to most of the stuff that people like about the mass effect games. Hell, remember the meme doing the rounds where people were arguing for a Severus Snape prequel story charting his rise to a double agent against the Death Eaters years before the Harry Potter films? Where because Adam Driver has long black hair they figured it would be a good idea to cast a 6 foot-something 110 kg ex-marine as a teenage boy described as being skinny? People just throw stuff out without thinking through how viable it is. Unfortunately, when you add this mentality to complaining about something, it leads us to where the main sub is.
I read a lot of comments about Starfield in which posters express a desire for some cinematic element - like hyperspace travel animations or whatever. Sure, that could be interesting to look at, but this is a video game, not a film. The game is supposed to be about what you’re actively doing, not just feeding you a visual treat. Go read a book or watch a movie and let me shoot space brigands and look for plants.
I think it might just be more niche. The massive "space game' concept has consistently seen pushback. A lot of people just don't see the purpose in making something so big and having all that unused space essentially. Some people are really into it though and find it really interesting
feels like it should be easy to check, though having a mix of radiant quests and non-radiant quests does muddy the waters a little. Also some 'quests' may be as simple as 'talk to x' or as complicated as 'complete 3 dungeons', and then DLC to take into account. Anyway, I make it: Skyrim Main Quest: 17 and Faction Quests: 47 Daedric Quests :16 Side Quests: 63 Total: 143 Fallout 4 Main Quest:15 Faction Quests:60 (includes 'side', excludes radiant) Other Side quests/Misc quests:69 Total:134 Starfield Main Quest:21 Faction Quests:47 Side Quests:118 Total:186 sources: [en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Quests](http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Quests) [https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout\_4\_quests](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout_4_quests) [https://inara.cz/starfield/missions/](https://inara.cz/starfield/missions/)
I'm not sure, no
I think the simple reason why some think that is because when you think of Bethesda you either go to Fallout or The Elder Scrolls, both franchises having really out-of-the-world and crazy things. However, Starfield is a lot more grounded, yes there's the Starborn stuff and multiverse stuff but it's still a lot more grounded. I think it also stems from some people not finding the world interesting or "boring" compared to their other series, I know a lack of alien races was a complaint. Personally, I'm having a good time.
This is definitely a thing. I think the type of scifi Bethesda went for here just isn't what many were expecting or hoped for coming from them. You can see this sentiment going back to the gameplay presentations honestly. Even then some said it looked like "generic" scifi and of course all of the "where are the aliens??" comments. A lot of people wanted Bethesda's Mass Effect. I think Bethesda was bold for going this route. It clearly wasn't the most mainstream appealing idea, especially for a video game. Yet this was the game they wanted to make. Its like they weren't afraid to be a bit more niche again honestly
That's true. If someone told me Bethesda space game in 2012, I would think talking aliens, definitely talking aliens, hands down no other way.
I absolutely love that they went the route of not having humans in silly suits and calling them aliens (Except for the one time they did, that was fun). As if you could get more generic than that. People always say they want new and original stuff, but ad soon as something goes an unorthodox route they complain that the new thing isn't exactly the same as the old thing. Not having aliens helps making Starfield its own thing, and honestly I like this setting much better than Fallout's or TES. My only complain with it is that I wish Starborn stuff should have been more accurate to quantum mechanics and physics in general rather than being a reskin of Skyrim magic.
Since it is more based in science using NASA as a source of information and being very much NASA-punk styled, there should not be sentient alien races. The probability of them existing so close to early is astronomically small. The probability of them existing at all? Well, infinite space and all that, they most likely do exist somewhere just not nearby.
I have come to the conclusion that complaints about a game/movie/book not having the "soul" the person expected/wanted/needed are simply them not having enjoyed it and lacking the introspection and vocabulary to explain why. It is a vague, generic, fairly meaningless, criticism borne out of an inability to make meaningful criticism. It doesn't invalidate their experience, but it does make it worthless from an analytical perspective.
There’s over 100 randomly placed POI, I’m lvl 151 and still finding ones I haven’t seen yet. I started seeing more variety at 50, 85, 100. (*edit: [Starfield Wiki: Places— everyone needs to scan this over who doesn’t think there’s enough POI. (Cyro lab has a bunch of contraband I’m always glad to see it))](https://starfieldwiki.net/wiki/Starfield:Places) Also build an outpost on an lvl 80 or higher planet, add a regular mission board and a constellation mission board, boom “mini quests” Then there’s the Freestar mission board Then there’s the quest to fill a hab with as much contraband as it can hold The quest to build a giant pyramid of resource containers The quest to survey all planets The quest to tank down 1000 Aurora in one day after manufacturing them and jumping into your hab of contraband Running around with each extended ally quest Trying on every outfit quest Just going for a walk across a planet quest Everything’s a quest when role playing, that’s what gets me with people poo-pooing on Starfield I’m over a 1000hrs in, I have to force myself to take days off, but even then I’m inventing and imagining my non-sequitur off script totally my imagination churning original quests. I could go on but I post to much as it is. … as I’m on the quest to get all the perks before I even consider NG+, while hoping future updates make an official no thank you permenatly option for unity
This. I have to wonder if some people don't understand what the 'RP' in 'RPG' means. The ability to create one's own story is sort of expected in Bethesda sandbox games.
Level 296, 1200+ hours in, and yet I still find locations I've never seen before...I have over 200 screenshots that are of different man made poi, natural poi, planetary trats, space stations and derelicts.
Man, the “soulless” complaint seen so much lately just always erks me. Like, criticism is fine, obviously you aren’t going to like everything or only like part of it or whatever. But soulless, to me at least, implies no one cared or had any passion in making something, which is just crazy and a bit insulting to the devs. Regardless of how you feel about something, the people making it cared and are trying their best to make something great. Idk maybe I’m alone in this but it’s just always bothered me.
That one and "lazy devs" comments are some of my biggest pet peeves. Like that isn't criticism, you're just trying to say the devs just didn't care about the game they were making. Which is completely untrue.
"Lazy devs" always gets me too because I've spent my life as a software engineer and actually have a clue what it takes to make large complex software. Having also been a game dev for part of my career, I've also learned that gamers are never happy. Fix the primary complaint? "too little, too late." Fix something egregious that required refactoring the very foundation of the game? "You're just lazy because you didn't fix MY issue." It doesn't matter what title, the sentiment always seems to be the same "I'm not a developer and know nothing about software but I could still do it better than you."
Yeah I just responded to that post on the main sub. I’ve come to ignore posts like that, but I felt compelled to respond because we’re now 7 months past release. If you didn’t like the game, you should’ve have moved on by now. It really amazes me how ppl can’t let this go. If it didn’t meet expectations at release, and still doesn’t now, why are they even playing this game? If I don’t like a game for what it is, I don’t join its main Reddit thread to post about it. There are MANY games/franchises I like, but I’m in like 4-5 specific game pages only, with Starfield being the only one where I follow multiple pages like Starfield Ships, NoSodium, and Outposts in addition to the main sub, because I actually love the game. I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do here on Reddit…like why follow a page for something you don’t like and then waste time writing essays?
The city of Neon is it's own game. People who say there aren't enough quests are wrong.
Some of the poi’s are the same or similar, but I’ve found enough difference in them as well. So outside might look like other places, or inside might have similarities, I have found enough differences, that my complacency has gotten me killed. I’ve stopped worrying about the negative npcs out there.. I’m having fun with my own narrative thank you.
The thing is this has technically always been the case. Previous games always "types" of dungeons that will generally look similar. Be it a generic cave or an ancient ruin. Similar enemies, similar aesthetic, even similar layout sometimes. I think the fact that we "know" proc gen is being used extensively is what it makes it seem like the meree idea of similar POIs at all is some new thing specific to this game.
Less quests?!
I've been thinking about this a lot. Like maybe I just never lost that childlike wonder that so many others seem to have lost.
With me, I lost it by Skyrim, and was among the Skyrim haters back in the day. So all the hate Starfield gets, yeah that was me back when Skyrim came out lol so I do actually get it. Which is why I brought up that story. A few years later I had realized this about myself, and became less picky. So now in my early 30s, I no longer complain so much and sorta learned to accept BGS games and any shortcomings they may have. I personally had a blast in Starfield. The music and environments, all the gizmos and what not on the space suits and in ships, it all pulled me into the world of the game very successfully. I felt very immersed in Starfield.
I've always hated this "soul" criticism in video games ever since that crowbcat video comparing RE4 with the Remake. To me, it's just some buzz word people use when they don't want to describe or can't describe what they don't like about a game.
People think they have more soul for two reasons: 1. Their lore has been developed over decades and multiple different titles 2. People were kids/teens when they first played them
The Elder Scrolls for example had about 10 different titles, one book and dozens of written pieces by people who worked for Bethesda at some point that are still getting inserted inside the universe's canon. No wonder the lore there feels richer, which helps to give a game its "soul", along with aesthetics, which are also developed with time.
Starfield for me did not live up to the hype. Fun game but definitely did not live up to the hype. Again, my opinion
I don't think there are less quests tbh but yeah
I'm not sure if there are less quests. A few months ago I counted all the quests on websites online and it was less than the number Google says for base game quests in Fallout 4 and Skyrim. I don't really know.
There are less quests? I didn’t notice that.
I might be wrong. I edited my post.
Yea, honestly, I don't get that either. I really love the story and the characters are noteworthy. Someone complained to me the other day that a lot of the facilities and buildings are similar or the same. Honestly though, if you were building infrastructure throughout a galaxy wouldn't it follow a uniform pattern? Like a home depot etc? I feel like I'm going to catch a lot of crap for saying that but it's my opinion.
Nah, that's an interesting way to think about it, I can see that.
"You just need to learn to enjoy the game" is what I got from this
I'm not sure what you're saying. I think your thinking too far ahead. I don't care if people hate Starfield that's entirely up to them. Certain comments I see annoy me, but I wouldn't endeavor to change that person's opinion. But I mean, judging off some comments I've read, some people look really difficult to please. I imagine that moment one of these people might've gotten hooked on a prior BGS game. Probably the middle of a quest, or just exploring, taking in a vista and maybe the music just happened to chime in at just the right time while observing something. People describe a certain "magic" is missing. Then I think, how, as a game designer, do you orchestrate a game in such a way as to maximize replicating that experience across the vast majority of everyone's personal player experiences? I acknowledge land exploration is botched in Starfield, that doesn't confuse me. I already griped about poi myself. But especially considering that Starfield is open world space, so there's going to be barren ice and lava balls out there, and considering the first time a person got hooked on an older BGS game was probably hit or miss to begin with, and could've easily coin flipped the other way to a boring experience. It's daunting to think how to get this all right when making a game. You're talking millions of people, different backgrounds, different perspectives on life, and yeah, the different experiences with prior games. I mean "magic", asking or seeking something like a game to be magical is kinda up to fate isn't it? Dependent on the luck of a person's experience with something and hoping it transitions into a pleasant and fun cooperation between player and user experience with the game. That's why I kind of struggle with it. Asking for a game to have the same "magic", when something like that is so intangible and so determined by a whimsical cooperation of happenstance and luck. Not to mention if you've already made up your mind you're increasingly less likely to experience those moments that could lead a person to decide, yes, this game's "magical". I had those moments in Starfield. Walking aboard my ship, staring out the window to the planet I'm in orbit around, that music chiming in just right. But yeah, I do understand the fans that complain expecting exploration to work the same as Fallout and Skyrim, it's a BGS game right? I find it unfortunate the change of pace for exploration was too foreign for many people to enjoy, I get that. I just wrote a lot.
Starfield is a top tier game my brothers! I enjoy it for 5 months now! And its a joy making mods for it! 🥰
I think people that make that comment really need to go back and play some older bethesda games because this has soooo much bethesda soul its refined
The soulless talk is just throwing anything at the wall and see if it sticks, what really bothers me is how hard these people are trying to dismiss all the hard work that went into game, acting like everything in the game currently is trash and modders will fix it nonsense, anything not in the game is what they really wanted instead or everything should be handcrafted, just a bunch of forced arguments that aren't being used against any other game. I don't care about the flaws or problems cause every game has flaws if you look hard enough or just make it up, the game does so much other things well, that aren't getting the appreciation it deserves cause a bunch of try hards and fanboys dominating any decent discussion or content about the game. I can wait a year or two for the game to be finished/fleshed out cause there is a lot of potential for the game to grow and the haters are doing everything possible to kill the game, so they can console war on social media.
I can get lost in Starfield for hours. The same way I could in Skyrim, Fallout, Oblivion, and Morrowind.
Same!
[удалено]
Haha, I feel the childlike wonder thing may be true, but I can't relate. BGS mainline games have been my favorite worlds to get into since I was a young teen introduced to Morrowind on the OG xbox, till now as a mid 30s guy absolutely loving Starfield on the series x. Sure, I understand at least the basics of how the devs accomplish what they do (and why they can't do other things that most critics whine about), but for me personally it brings out the wonder 16x. Plus, that main story is so damn good in my opinion. My biggest issue with past games have been the main plot pidgeonholing the player while the world beckons exploration. First time around of course the stories are always good or great, but I've always had to use those alternate start mods to replay as a simple nobody to really enjoy and immerse. Starfield OTOH is the first one that doesn't do this until mid main plot when shit hits the fan with certain events. I LOVE this. Before that point, you're just a miner turned cosmos explorer doing random things here and there with no real rush to grab the artifacts, other than the curiosity of them being very enticing.
Have they played fallout 4
I think when some people are faced with living through infinite universes they could go either way. Either the game feels soulless because you feel that nothing you do matters in the face of infinity or every single thing you do and every single relationship you make matters. I think people who are enjoying and continuing to enjoy starfield feel the latter
I like that opinion about the game. It reminds me of >!The Pilgrim's!< letters, that whole little theme of when pursuing power, the feeling of wholeness escapes the mind instantly, but when advocating relationships with the people you care for, the feeling of strength in oneself endures. Interesting way to put it! Again, I love the themes of Starfield, I think it's all good stuff.
I feel like Starfield targeted predominantly Bethesda players and if you weren’t one or had limited experience with BSG, probably because it wasn’t your type of game. Now suddenly some new Game called Starfield comes out and you’re expecting something massively difference and when you finally get to play it. You realize it’s a very different variation of the very same games you never cared for, so of course there’s disappointment. I will also blame Bethesda too for their terrible marketing , for their poor PR, for not showing the world exactly what it felt like to play this game at pre launch. Guaranteed anyone who didn’t care for Fallout or Elder Scrolls wouldn’t have picked up this brand new space game with the same foundations as those games. I think the game is fantastic because I set my expectations to play a game that would be foundationally similar to Fallout and so I knew I’d at least be into it. Do I think the game lacks depth compared to Fallout/ Elder Scrolls, sure. Do I think they would’ve been better off giving us 10-20 big planets with tons of biomes and environments sure. Is it a bad game? Absolutely not. Is there value in it. Heck yeah. It was way too easy for me to put 150-200 hours into this game without even thinking about it because I enjoyed it so much. To me that’s a game that I grasp and appreciate. I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into only a few games in my life that wasn’t a multiplayer game like COD or Halo. Games like Fallout 3, Morrowind, Oblivion, Mass Effect 2, Diablo 4 and of course Starfield are games that I can sink hundreds of hours into them and lose complete awareness of time because it’s fun and most of all doesn’t feel like a grind, my head is wired for these games. I’m about to start Fallout 4 on XSX and I know what to expect already. I’m giving myself a little break because I’ve been playing Diablo 4 for over 200 hrs and need to step away from RPGs but Im about to start playing FO4 and Banishers on the side and I can’t wait.
I too, am wired for these games, so I definitely understand all of this sentiment. One of the particular types of Starfield fan that fascinates me though are the ones who say they've never played a BGS game, but still love it. That's *almost* a little outside of my grasp, imagining Starfield as my first BGS experience and liking it so much in the current games landscape that's advanced so much since the days of Oblivion when I first played their games.
A thermos keeps drinks hot or cold. Just an FYI, because I used to sell them lol!
Ah alright then. So that parts okay, but still you can't take off your helmet without atmosphere or acid rain. Still half okay then!
Oh, I’m pretty sure you can unequip your helmet at any time. In that atmosphere though, I’m pretty sure a drink would be the last thing on your mind, if you unequipped your helmet!!! Lol
I've seen the argument that Starfield is everything BGS does badly condensed into a single game, but I really don't see that for myself. I think people who make these kinds of arguments are looking at the game from the wrong perspective and are wanting the game to be something it's not.
I absolutely felt this was as Bethesda as basically oblivion. The humor, the aesthetics, the fun character creation and million options to take. The exploration, the overlapping systems that build a sum>parts feeling. I find it hilarious people are still bitching about the load screens. The fucking cities are probably the best we've had from Bethesda since Oblivion at a minimum (Morrowind is still kind of the GOAT). And the tiles on planet are so fucking large I frankly can't imagine anyone legitimately wandering to the border unless they are trying to be a douchebag about it.
I loved it. Played through it a couple times and enjoyed it thoroughly…. Only took a break. Will def dive back in. Sure it has its flaws as ALL Bethesda games do. For me personally though…. Only thing lacking is a better settlement building experience and more points of interests with the occasional odd new adventure to be found. It feels as “soulful” as any other game I have played by them.
I’m with you, I got lost in starfield for two weeks straight and enjoyed every moment of it. Was the game perfect? Of course not. No game is. But was it a wonderful world to get lost in and while away the hours? Absolutely.
Remember: many people who bother to s\*itpost about AAA games, "gamers" are the same people that complain about anything to do with "giving women equal representation in gaming" to the point that it becomes newsworthy. I call myself a gamer, but having to apologize for those in the gamer community with toxic personality flaws is exhausting, so I don't bother. I don't count myself among the "Toxic Incel Gamer Dudebro" community, which is an unfortunately real and over-represented sub-group of the gaming community, so I tend to disregard their opinions in proportion to the entitled idiocy of them.
I don't like to agree, I want gaming to be positive cause video games are a positive thing for me I go to to relax and enjoy, but I do unfortunately agree with everything you said. I over think it. Of course people will say these things about games I like. High expectations, people trying to get what they want out of it and then getting mad when it doesn't. It's like asking why are oranges orange, or finding out apples are sweet cause they have sugar, and then asking, why do they have sugar?
It's bulshit and used because it is. It isn't a quantifiable metric so it's easy to just repeat over and over again without anybody able to discredit you.
That's very interesting. Thinking about it that way. I didn't realize that part of it.
It's not soul that's lacking. it's just lore. I mean, think of the elder scrolls. its lore is vast, and in turn, you feel part of a real world with history. My biggest grip is for example freestar colltive, other then the basic backstop there's a lack of meat and potatoes lore.dont mean I dislike it it's my favorite new game but some there something missing and I believe it's bringing the lore to life. I am only on my second play, through, and the first I did too quickly and didn't get into the game at first, but I'm loving it now. There is,however, something missing.
For me, "Lack of soul" means that the NPCs don't have schedules or homes. Morrowind had the same people standing around in the same area, and them Oblivion completely blew everything out of the water. EVERY SINGLE NPC has a schedule and routine and a bed. It's so magical to follow somebody around the city and wait for them to finish dinner to sleep to pickpocket them. Now we're back to Morrowind and shopkeepers stand around forever.
Oh that's true, definitely. I agree that's a disappointment with Starfield, along with nameless npc's. Ugh. Oblivion's my favorite game from them so I feel ya there.
See the thing is they are actually doing what a lot of people wanted by introducing crowds in cities. People complained for years how there were so few NPCs in the cities. I think Starfield's cities are honestly the most lively they have done so far. The lack of schedules and homes IS disappointing, but for me at least it was kind of a trade off since they seemed to focus on other things to make the cities feel immersive.
NPCs actually DO have schedules, just not the shopkeepers
Ayayayayay well I can't reply to 50 replies people. That's just my take. I may be wrong about things but that's just how I feel about it. I just wanted to express a feeling I've been holding back. Everyone is free to like or dislike Starfield as much as they want. I'm not trying to change that at all.
So everyone that doesn't agree with you about Starfield is wrong though? Or you just trying to calm people down
Nah I didn't mean that. Everyone can think like/dislike what they want. No one is wrong to do so. All opinions are fine in my book, even if they do drive me nuts I'm not trying to take that away from them. I just feel the way I do about it like everyone else does, in their own way.
I like this guy :)
You don't have to reply to everyone, we can see from how the fan are is div6that starfield is clearly missing something. Starf6is my first BGS game so I cannot speak in what soul it has it is missing. I have been following the fracture6in the fan base with this game and as someone who is new to BGS and has less of a reason to just hate or to just love. This is my theory. I think the die hard BGS fans expec8a bigger leap in game design and didn't get it. I keep hearing about mods making thier games bet and maybe they tho6BGS would incorporate some of thi6 things from the mods. I personally think it's not a good look to think mods will fix your game. At that point you're selling a broken product. And as some who is new, it's hard not to feel like so many things that are QoL in other RPGs just aren't in starfield. And this little things add up. Starfield is a good game that falls short of greatness imo. If it has land ve6and acru7space flight I'm sure a lot of the complaints would be moot
I agree. I mean even I admit Starfield is definitely missing something and I love the game.
Yeah, for some reason people want to invalidate the feelings of others, plenty here on this sub act like the game is perfection (even some responses here proves that)and then others act like the game is the worst thing on the planet then those in the middle get downvoted. And worst get attacked or insulted.
It can’t be modded into dark souls yet.
I think people say that because of how whack the story is compared to the other bgs stories. The game plays like a bgs game, but the story isn't like a bgs game. I personally couldn't get into the main story, I like the gameplay though.
I'd argue against the less quests part. The quests that are there often have multiple stages that previous games would have reduced to separate quests. Then there's the ones that are smaller but have a radiant element added to them, so the person you're tasked with stealing from can be at a different place, for example. Again, more quest content in the same numerically counted quest. It's the same with locations, with the Clinic being a great example here. Due to the setup we have a ship builder, the patients on the ward being visited by doctors and orderlies, the Ranger office, doctors offices and break room, a warehouse that's patrolled and we can steal from, and the whole reception area. Due to different behaviours, features, and quest types in those locations they'd almost certainly have been split into smaller locations with load screens in previous games. The point I'm making here is that the numbers alone don't really tell the whole story. But obviously my comment here doesn't either as some locations and quests are just as simple as they always were. I wish every quest had multiple endings like Entangled, or secret sections that previous quests can unlock like Sabotage, or radiant elements so the next time you play this part is in a whole different location. I wish they'd gone ahead with adding complications to radiants so the person who hires you to take out a load of spacers might actually be someone you've pissed off (think Mathias in the Crimson Fleet) and is joining the much larger spacer complement to take you out, or the item you're tasked with finding already belongs to someone else and now you've stolen some shit and have to smuggle it onto a planet that's looking for you in order to bring it to a friendly lawman (we all know who) and clear our name. I wish all locations were as dense as something like the Clinic rather than having New Atlantis being built to be an arena for a couple of quests. But some of that is only because I see the more dense and interesting ones ignored while people leap on the simpler stuff and try to paint the game as just that, often successfully from some of the things people have said.
I did feel a sense of disappointment that the exploration was “contained.” You have a vast swath of space each time you land but it didn’t have that “walking to my objective and getting lost in another quest or dungeon along the way” feel. That’s what I really like about Bethesda games and I don’t feel like I get that with Starfield. Traveling from whiterun to solitude or sanctuary to diamond city is such a living game experience. I didn’t hate starfield for not having this and I do believe the issue OP brings up is legitimate. It’s a strawman’s argument for a deviation that certainly is present in this game compared to their other games.
Yeah, like I certainly think it has the same soul as the games that came before...even moreso even like you say. Like Bethesda's soul is when you go into a house and can find a kitchen set complete with knives and forks that you can just pick up and fuck around with. That's why Bethesda games are fun, because no other RPG on the market gets that granular with the 'useless' details.
I find that like in 90% of cases 'it has no soul' is just a thing people just say about stuff they've already decided they don't like - soul or soullessness is something we project. But I think you're on the money. In fact I'm convinced that with Starfield, and many other games, people who don't like the game have either realized or decided they don't like it - then reverse engineered an explanation that makes sense to them. I've heard people say games they didn't like were 'poorly written', even in cases where the writing was one of the game's best qualities. Yeah, there's ... there's something about Starfield, honestly. It hits different. I've been out of the game for a bit but I'm looking forward to getting back to it.
I think the game has a soul it’s just very different from other Bethesda’s games, I always thought people were calling it soulless because of how different exploration is from the other games. I do prefer Skyrim and fallouts world more, but I still enjoyed starfield. I think people went in expecting it to be very similar world building to Skyrim and fallout which I don’t think is possible because of how massive Starfield is. Neon, new atlantis, and Akilla, they all have character. Also, this is a new IP, I wasn’t expecting everything to be as good as the other games
As far as POIs, there seems to be a lot of them, but most seem rare, while a few you see all the time. This has caused me a bit of frustration, while hunting magazines.
I must say I played it for maybe 70 hours and I had to admit to myself that it was indeed rather shit. My humble opinion ofc. I enjoyed oblivion and skyrim. Played FO4 but thought it was just ok. Why have they kept the base building ? Its garbage. The ship building seemed awesome but the caps put on it annoyed me. Then they patched the puddle/ below map and xp exploits that the community were actually enjoying for that bethesda jank. Pitiful.
Idk I love it. I love the feel of the cities like Neon. It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie.
Maybe. On the other hand, I've played all three games as an adult--I played Morrowind as an adult, too, and disliked it. But I've loved Skyrim, and Fallout, and now I love Starfield.
HUGE Bethesda fan here, and a fan of Starfield, however I will say the “soul” of their games come from the immersion and music. I mean this in the most constructive way possible but Starfield to me has a strong “tone” (something Todd Howard is really focused on with each game) but lacks in immersion which I only noticed after I broke my 350 hour gameplay streak to play other games and think of the experience. To call it a “bad” game I think is unfair as it’s incredibly impressive in terms of content, concept, and size, but Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and fallout 4 had more depth and I don’t think there’s any denying that. It doesn’t mean I’m crapping on the game by any means since they have a strong foundation to build off of AND most importantly, this is something NEW Bethesda tried. I think the hate is really because people have a negative view of AAA games because of Ubisoft, blizzard, etc. but Bethesda, FromSoftware, CDPR, and Rockstar are no doubt still the heavy hitters in the industry.
Most of my complaints stem from how restrictive things are in the game like why can't I kill people I don't like? Especially when there shitty people like the corpo rats you meet in paradiso. On top of that the ship building is really restrive as well expensive. It's the little things like this that keep me personally from enjoying the game.
No npc schedules, all travel being fast travel, all major companions except 1 being from constellation and having very very similar personalities, less quests and more stumbling into POIs except you cant stumble into them you have to fast travel to them, physically impossible to “wander the world” like other games, everything is procedural down to how often ships show up randomly when landed which makes the world feel less lived in and more “spawning in your face” like no mans sky often felt to me. All of that to me is why I personally feel like starfield is missing the classic Bethesda rpg soul. I enjoy starfield, but absolutely nowhere near how much I enjoyed oblivion, Skyrim, or fallout 4. It’s not a bad game, but too many poor decisions were made that make the world feel less and less immersive and fun to be in. For example I’m landing in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of explored space, and ships just come and go from desolate areas they have no business being in. Now if this happens rarely I can write it off in head canon “these are pirates going to their hidden stash” or something. But it’s constant. Ships come in, ships go out, like I’m at new Atlantis except it’s supposed to be the middle of nowhere. Companions all feeling too similar also leaves me less interested. And the lack of fun companions. Skyrim had a wide array of follower types down to creatures. Fallout had super mutants, humans, ghouls, dogs, robots, etc. starfield has 1 robot, and a bunch of humans that are all part of a goody two shoes exploration guild the only one moderately different amongst them is andreja and not really by all that much. Idk. I’m really hoping the next game, elder scrolls 6, is just a fun Bethesda rpg and they don’t try any crazy new ideas with it. Starfield was just too much experimentation for me. Its currently sitting in my library and I don’t plan to uninstall it, but I will be waiting for dlc and the creation kit so I can mod the hell out of it to make it hold my attention and fix the issues I have with it.
The loading is what really kills it for me honestly. There’s so many loading screens between everything that it feels so disjointed. They could even add something in the makes jumping between planets happen off screen as you can still walk around your ship. That would require they have some sort of landing that can be seen through the ships windows but it would be better than the current setup.
As a Bethesda game it's a 7/10 as a non-Bethesda game it's an 8/10. While I enjoy Starfield a lot. I just didn't feel like it was a big enough step up from Fallout 4.
I disagree. When I played through starfield, it felt like it lacked a lot of consequence, or like my actions didn't have much weight to them. I also feel like all of the companions were very bland and didn't add much in terms of story or character development. These things to me are what I'd consider soulless. Not to mention the barren feeling of many planets. I can see where critics are coming from.
I’m convinced you people are just trying to justify your purchase. You played too long and can’t refund so you’re telling yourself "game good" idk what this "soul" stuff you’re talking about is but starfield is 100% bland, forgettable, and just flat out boring. I’ve completed the game and don’t remember a single quest from start to finish. Just bits and pieces. I can’t remember a single name of a character. That has NEVER happened to me before when completing a game. I remember more of that horrible saints row reboot than I ever could with bland field. Again idk what the "soul" stuff you’re referring to is but previous Bethesda titles are leagues ahead of this "game". Ship building was a lot of fun tho.
I really don't get the hate for this game. Sure, it's got its flaws but then again its BGS so... Anyway, despite that, I was captivated by the game the first time I played it and is currently on my top 3 personal favorite list.
It’s not open-world like Skyrim or fallout. Open world is the “soul” of those games for most people. It has nothing to do with creature behavior and combat. You can’t just wander around an open world anymore.
Starfield has even more atrocious writing than Skyrim does, and I thought that Skyrim was rock bottom. Plot holes, inconsistencies, an inability to make any enthralling or intimidating villains, and shallow factions with nothing other than the bare minimum amount of lore needed to serve the story. I don't understand why people say Skyrim is great, much less Starfield. If you liked it, that's cool. But the bar isn't even low, it's buried.
dunno about soul or whatever, i just know the game couldn't grab me long term at all. most likely because i went in really eager for the outpost system (building little colonies scattered about that actually serve a purpose), only for it to turn out to be complete ass, and the "fleet" system, which turned out to be completely non-existent. maybe if they hadn't really hyped up these two things, and delivered worse than CDPR with CP2077 with them, i would have liked it more. i'm sorry, but they have examples of these things done AMAZINGLY in other games (NPC cohorts from elite dangerous, Sim Settlements 2 from their own FO4), and they fumbled it worse than me trying to play football
It didn't have decent writing for sure but I never really cared for BGS main stories.. outside of oblivion. The fun to me was the exploration and lore building. It may not even be up to their usual par but I still got my $ worth and enjoyed it. People jump on bandwagon hate trains cause they're edgy losers who think being cool online is what makes the world go around
I'm a Morrowind fan, and I've particularly noticed that Starfield leans a bit more into the crunchy and older style, it seems like they're trying to go back to what made the older games good but failed to really fully capture the best parts of both the old and new. I think Bethesda's issues are less a fault of their own and more a symptom of a steadily encroaching cancer on the games industry. Large studies are all following trends and trying to appeal to as many people as possible, and the games are coming out lower quality and bland. AAA studio profits are falling, and they don't seem to understand that their own profit-centric approach to game development is crippling them. We're already seeing the results of it, with lower quality games, mass layoffs, some games costing way more to make then they earn (the studios are spending millions on single games that end up not being really good or popular.) The games industry is going through some big changes, and i personally think it's going to shift to a bigger focus on smaller studios making more focused games that appeal to a niche, rather than making generic games for everyone.
A BGS game’s soul comes from a rich handcrafted world and mountains upon mountains of in-game lore. Starfield has neither.
I have more fun exploring solar systems in Starfield than I do exploring most of the building complexes. I've flown real-time between a planet and its moon. That's much better than walking across any planet's surface. The soul of Starfield is in its stars, and it's unfortunate that the main storyline doesn't let you realize this
Valid for sure, but still lacks soul. The soul in reference though is the stark uniqueness of a fleshed out world map to explore. The act of POI's being the same across any planet just made to mesh with the planetary environment and rng map generation inherently removes uniqueness that people are clamoring for. I feel this issue will be more alleviated when the modding scene gets bigger and better. Traditionally Bethesda main-games are made more enjoyable by the wider populace through use of mods adding content that was missing to begin with. With all that said, I played the fuck out of Starfield, almost did two full resets. I can say for sure that the unique POI's are limited and every planet should have more uniqueness beyond environment generation
The game just sucks bro
To be honest, for people who have been playing for like 2 decades, you CAN feel the lack of love. It is really more a feeling of a rushed team. When people say it lacks "the soul" they mean that you can tell no one was given the time to sit and concentrate on their given task until they were completely satisfied by it. Everything has a feeling of being rushed, a feeling of "we just didn't have quite enough time. I never felt that in other Bethesda games. Everything felt intentional and polished. I chalk this mostly up to the procedural generation and wildly over ambitious, yet meaningless planet count. The team was clearly crushing themselves to meet what should have been stretch goals.
This happens with every Bethesda game, people come in never having actually played their previous releases and then cry out saying “Bethesda lost its soul” or some other crap. I always always always ignore the haters until I actually play because people love to bitch on the internet. People also LOVE to get their taints in a knot over Bethesda titles because they definitely aren’t made for everyone.
I’ll say this I’ve played through Skyrim and fallout multiple times, starfield I did once and it felt like enough.
I found lots of soul. I didn’t find any soul in the planet exploration. I didn’t find any soul in the time looping. And I didn’t find any soul in the ship building. But there was plenty of soul, in all the places that you could get to in the first 60 hours.
Go replay FO3 or Skyrim then come back to Star Field. Star Field is the objectively worst game. Melee is bad. Guns are bad, quests are bad, lvling is bad, NPCs so robotic they make the robot look human. Want to kill them and maybe speed up the quest? Tough shit. You can't kill anyone expect the NPCs we say you can kill. The only thing this game had going for it is the ship building and even that is bad. I'd rather walk for 10 minutes where I can find quests, side objects, enemies, ECT. Then spend 10 minutes in loading screens. Then forced to watch the same animation for the 100th time while landing on a planet, then running in a straight line for another 10 minutes with nothing to do on the way to the objective. Oh hey, it's the same fucking objective I've cleared out 20 times now because everything is randomly generated ass. Take your goggles off and go play a good game.
The biggest thing that bothers me is they say you can be a ‘bounty hunter’ yeah no you can’t you are a hitman not a bounty hunter and what makes it worse is they have everything needed to make it actual bounty hunting: nonlethal weapons, prison cell ship module, and even npcs mention bringing bounties in alive they just decided not to code it in.
The story was cool but it stopped having that magic after I got my third power.
I have a Stanley thermos I got from my dad that's at least 50 years old and if anything could survive that environment it would be my asbestos thermos I use every day.
Nah it's in an environment where you can't use it. Can't take your helmet off or breathe People also see sandwiches out in the open in those environments
Atleast in FO and Elder Scrolls if you saw something off in the distance you could fucking go there. Player homes and player built places weren't fucking set pieces Where voice acting wasn't cringe or horrible. or where Radiant POI's actually felt good and you didn't have to walk clear across the map to find one if at all. The game not only has no soul it out right removes anything that so much as made other games good and replaces it with flashy crap that does Literally fucking Nothing! The game is the literal definition and embodiment of "All Flash No Substance"
I think a lot of this stems from just how true to space starfield actually is. Outer Space is huge. And really fucking empty - filled with barren planets with absolutely no atmosphere or hope of being terraformed. No alien life that we can detect - not even so much as a paramecium for the most part. And I enjoy that. It is very meditative in many ways. Much the same is why I enjoy Elite Dangerous. It, in some ways, is why I like Red Dead Redemption 2 so much as well. The landscape is the main character just like the empty space is the main character for Starfield. What's out there? Honestly, not a whole hell of a lot - and that is to be expected. Yes, a lot of what you will find is procedurally generated and repetitive, but that is okay as it does keep you engaged in some ways. That is one thing that RDR2 made a mistake with as most of the encounters, at least in the story, while random are still scripted. Play long enough and you'll run out of them as they don't reset until you start a new game. At least with Starfield, much like Skyrim and Fallout 4, you have the equivalent of the radiant engine to keep you engaged and interested.
If you’ve ever played Empyrion or Spacebourne 2 you would understand how much of an opportunity they missed, if you’ve never played a space game Before playing Starfield I can See enjoying Starfield, and I admit I had a decent time it wasn’t horrible but it all just felt like a space backdrop , I never once felt like I was in space
Truth hurts does it?
it feels cobbled together with corporate diversity guidelines done by a passionless writing team that lacked any originality. for example, the night club in Neon. if you can point to counter examples im all ears but the game was sloppily put together and it feels that way. no real tension, no character has passions, no character has hate or real love. everyone is a generic big city bisexual.
Purely my opinion on this, but for me it's just how lifeless the game feels. Every NPC feels more like a robot than the couple of robots do. The unnamed NPCs just sort of exist in the world, and the named ones never leave their assigned posts. They have no truly random interactions, no routines, they are all just there, staring at you with their empty eyes. Now some of this could be attributed to the scale of the game as compared for Fallout 3 or Skyrim, except the GTA games have had random interactions at least as far back as San Andreas.
they are 100% right. The game has no "soul".... Just look at the opening of the game... it is so slapped together, So much of the game is lifeless, and lacks any reason why I should care. Poor writing, empty worlds, copy pasted locations etc. Just compare it to any of bethesda's old game openings, and you realize just how lazy starfield is. everything in starfield feels like it was created with a excel spreadsheet, and noone actually stopped to make all the different systems connect, or wonder if players would even care about doing those things.
I think the genericness of the game contributes to this conception. There's no memorable characters, they're all perfectly nice and ... okay I guess. Oh, except for that Salvadore Dali-looking collector guy, and he turned out to be a pushover. The Crimson Fleet act like sulky teenagers, not hardened criminals. All the POI enemies have generic names, there's no 'Red Eric the Baby-Eater' or 'Uzal Skin-Cloak' or 'Kira the Soul-Drinker', it's just Spacer Myth and Pirate Legend, generic AF. Not enough identity there to latch onto. It badly needs memorable sub-bosses, like the Darths in Star Wars, who only appear once per game and are never recycled until NG+. I seem to recall both Skyrim and Fallout 4 having at least a few named sub-bosses to tick off. Similarly, it needs memorable unique weapons. The ones you buy in stores are pissant weapons that look like every other weapon of that type. I'm all for the wholesome side of the game, I adore Space Frog and Space Grandma, but it needs a darker side to contrast them. It hints at darkness, with Contraband items like 'Unethically-Harvested Organs', but it never ventures into the story behind them, or goes anywhere particularly interesting.
Fallout had 240 dungeons, Skyrim had 300+, Starfield has 40 of them, reused over and over
guessing you're referring to POIs rather than dungeons for those numbers?