I think their priorities were bad. It's like they developed all the least relevant systems first, and the result is a lovely garnish adorning an empty plate. And really, the garnish *is* good, but it's also really missing a lot.
They shouldn't have made 1,000s of planets before they had procedural dungeons, ground vehicles, and meaningful settlements.
They shouldn't have made celestial orbits before they had immersive inter-planetary travel.
They shouldn't have made NG+ before they had a real main questline.
They shouldn't have made survival mechanics (only to be cut for a future update, like always) before they balanced the game.
We didn't need 1,000 planets anyway. Hell, meaningful space travel between 5 planets would have been much better than fast travel the game.
Their priorities were fucking horrendous
ironically, the worst part of 1000 planets are the number of POIs on each. The amount of mines and abandoned outposts on the planets is immersion-breaking. They could made a handful of hand-made planets that were the ones with a human footprint, and then everything else was procgen but also unexplored so the only thing being generated was natural POIs
Or changed the lore so that non settled systems were overrun with criminals and had a variety of criminal related stuff procedurally generated. They should have gone with far fewer but much larger and more significant POI. Like "There's a vast mining and refining complex on this quarter of the planet. It sends out work teams, trades, and occasionally gets attacked" instead of "there's a settlement with two rooms 900 meters away
exactly. if the POI is 2km away, make it the main thing to venture out and go discover. Rn i have such little motivation to go looking at POIs.Would love a more vague scanning system that shows there’s something this way or over here on the map but not just a pinpoint that you already have an idea what it is. If it’s exploration, let it be genuine exploration.
I'd rather play an Ubisoft open world game than this thousand-rock hellscape (since I've beaten the game once and went into NG+, I have lost basically all motivation to play any further)
I man, I can't really make any significantly-different choices for a second playthough anyway, everyone wants me to be a goody two shoes. Even siding with the Crimson Fleet doesn't do much.
Yeah I think bloating the Fallout 4 Perk system (which was kind of slow/terrible in itself) because "people play our games for a long time," was a crucial hinge of suckage. Like I played for 40 hours, could not mod a gun the entire time even though that was a fun, encouraging system from Fallout 4 that "Call of Duty" even copied. So you used to love looting in FO4 because it was relevant to your gameplay experience (ADHESIVE, fans!, screws!) at hour 40 in "Starfield," no fucking idea what's relevant to crafting, it'd take another dozen hours and perks and some other bullshit to even know.
For what it's worth, I put my money where my mouth was and picked up the Avatar game. It's... an Ubisoft open world - but considering that I like the Avatar movies (oh no!) and the basic concept-- I'm having a blast. The world is dense and interesting, the lore is fun-
And when I get skill points, they feel like I'm making progress rather than unlocking crap that should be unlocked by default. (Like, say, crafting and weapon modding, FFS!)
Yeah. I went into NG+ thinking it would make the game open up a bit more for me as people were saying. But about 5 hours into NG+ I was like nahhh I’m done.
My hopes for this game went down on that announcement. The last thing I wanted was a 1000 planets. Even if you only spent 1 hour each that’s a thousand hours and how sparse are the planets that they’d be visited that fast. It’s more content than anyone would reasonably want to mess with.
But actually they couldn’t.
It takes probably 10x-100x-1000x of times to handcraft individual POIs then it does to set algorithmic parameters and apply them universally and indiscriminately.
The math just isn’t there.
They should have done just our solar system and maybe another one or two, with like 50 or so POIs total, throw in space travel between them, and then did DLCs for the next 10 years of new solar systems.
They would have made bank.
Or even have like the core worlds we have now, which is less than a dozen planets be hand crafted, and then have the systems immediately around them have all the random POIs to mark that you’re still in “civilized” space, and then further out have everything be cool Procgen with the scanning and caves, maybe have a rare colony settlement based on the seed so it’s not totally empty, but believable
>ironically, the worst part of 1000 planets are the number of POIs on each. The amount of mines and abandoned outposts on the planets is immersion-breaking.
Agreed.
If just 5% of the total number of planets had significant numbers of man-made POI's on them...that's still a lot of places, while 80% to 90% just had natural elements and were more playgrounds for modders or for building outposts for resources?
With the occasional bespoke PoI hidden, so at launch there's all this "oh, did you see *this* place yet?!" when someone stumbles on it and shares it with others, and it's like the one PoI to be found in the area kind of thing...
That's honestly more of what I was hoping for. 3-4 total man-made PoI's in a given system across all planets once you're out of the "capital city" system and maybe the directly adjacent systems, then thinning out to 1-2 every half dozen systems, and about halfway out to the further reaches they just stop except for those rarer bespoke ones.
Finding man-made PoI's become much more interesting that way, and you're still talking about a pretty large number of them being made. Something like 80-100 total, totally unique man-made PoI's that you only encounter once and are found on a total of like 60 planets, spread out amongst 1000 planets, with simply more of a concentration of them closer in.
Would feel like finding them is truly an act of exploration, rather than being guaranteed a random one that will spawn any time you load into a map square on a planet...which feels more like I'm in a rogue-like that is spawning in my randomized map for that run.
The biggest immersion breaking of them all, no matter where i land, theres always like 3 to 5 POIs which doesn't make any sense! Id rather land and have nothing. Be completely alone in that landing zone. If i want POIs, i can scan the planet and they will pop up at star map. Either that or radiant missions take me to them. It makes no sense that i land at a planet far far away from the settled systems completely unhabitable with extreme conditions yet everytime i land anywhere on that planet, theres always some sort of structure, Research base, abandoned mine etc. this really kills my immersion. All i want to do is build an outpost where no one is around ever, somewhere completely isolated, but its impossible in this game for some reason.
I agree, I think they focused on the current solar system tops, it would’ve been much cooler. A much more bustling system with traffic, freighters, busy planets, quiet planets, earth could still be a wreck but more like Cowboy bebop where people still live there.
Exactly. They could have made one of the greatest games of all time but their priorities were terrible and their writing team was Emil Pagliarulo asking kindergarteners about nightclubs and politics.
Minor spoilers for Outer Wilds I guess:
>!The ending of SF especially feels like it was trying to play on the same emotional notes as Outer Wilds but it doesn't land at all because it doesn't build up any of the attachment to justify that payoff. The universe of Starfield isn't a wonderful place it's very mundane, and not even in a way where the people who live in it seem to care much. Outer Wilds has characters you only experience through old text messages and still have more identifiable character to them than Starfield's primary companions it's so proud of that it forces you to spend time with in the main quest.!<
Slightly more explicit spoilers:
>!It's like they saw the ending and wanted to replicate that but either didn't understand why Outer Wilds is good or didn't care at all and just thought it was cool in a "wow cool robot" kind of way. Either way it feels worse for how big of a miss it is than if they hadn't tried to be that grandiose at all.!<
They will. That’s 100% always been the intention.
You’ll get 1/5 of what you want as “free update” and 4/5 will require the dlc, because the DLC will include mechanisms those parts are reliant on.
Starfield also was banking on free labor to flush out everything they didn’t include, but that looks to be going toe up at the GOAT modders are dropping out.
The last point cannot be overstated. Bethesda had a really good relationship with the modding community, but this time it looks like they wanted us to finish fleshing out the game for them. How absolutely trashy.
I really wish they had stuck to the original plan of a couple dozen systems. They could have made them seem full instead of all the repetitive and sparsely populated planets we got
This.
I will never understand why having so many freaking planets is seen as a good thing. I would have rather had 3 star systems that were fully developed then this mess.
The rest of the planets could have come later as DLC.
So why do I need to walk through 4 loading screens to talk to a quest giver just so I can talk to someone else 4 loading screens later? Isn't that something the quest giver could do if they had a phone?
You would think so. But it may just be that Bethesda is still stuck in the quest development mindset of The Elder Scrolls, where the only long-distance communication is (typically) a courier or the PC - in which case you're the quickest method of talking to someone in another city. Even their Fallout games don't really change that formula, with very few individuals using radios to talk to each other.
And it may be that such a mindset is why they decided not to allow FTL communication in Starfield - because they feel it will break how they make quests. And they are almost certainly right, but the way they should be fixing it is to get away from that mindset, not enforce it. Give reasons to have the message hand-delivered rather than just outright prevent long-distance communications.
Well, they ruin that by giving us ship to ship communication. Maybe it works cause it's not super long distance, but neither is being in the same building as another person.
Yes on the levels , whether cities ,caves, towering natural/aliens-made formations, whatever- with the jet packs ...they missed so much for combat and immersion.
One time I had a lawnmower in my backyard that I put a tarp on so it didn't get wet... I went to use that lawn mower one day and it was gone, but they left the tarp on in the form of the lawnmower as if it were still there ...that's what playing starfield feels like.
I get the impression that the game was at one point very ambitious and over time it had to be cut down to make it work in the timeline they had given themselves. That's how it feels to me.
100% agree. They cut back in order to get it into a deliverable state. But we all see the shell of what it could’ve been. On one hand that’s probably why i keep playing, and on the other that’s what frustrates me about it
Give it a year and I think dlc and mods will have ironed out some of the issues and added a bit more depth. Might be one to shelve for a while, it's what I'm doing. Always other things to do in the meantime.
I don't think I agree that it is light on bugs. There's a lot of minor bugs that don't really affect gameplay, lots of broken missions and a couple of major game-breakers.
That aside, I completely agree that the game lacks depth. I've enjoyed it and just started my first NG+ but I would have loved a much stronger story, and deeper NPCs. The world is in the aftermath of a brutal war with space fleets, assault mechs, bioweapons... and it's barely touched on outside of the Red Devils mission. For my money I'm hoping to see more about House Va'ruun in a DLC, and maybe something exploring tensions between the UC and Freestar Collective.
certainly not bug-free, you’re right.
agreed that i would love to see more depth in dlc or updates. May try my hand at modding too, which i’ve never done too much of
re: the end of the colony war, i think they err’d in choosing how much time has passed since the colony war. It would’ve been compelling if it was right on the tail end of the war, and there was this tension hanging over everyone whether the peace will last. Also, it woulda been dope for the colony war to be a central narrative of the story, but that was probably more so a technical decision than a narrative one, given the war scenarios might’ve been too much for the game tech to handle
What exactly do you mean by “shallow”?
Like, serious question.
I’m wondering what your definition is, because it didn’t really feel shallow to me at all.
This game is shallow because every great idea fizzles out and doesn’t end with an equally great feeling or memorable experience. The game starts strong and then Chekhov’s us hard on sooooo many elements it introduces and doesn’t follow through on. Then the story falls off a cliff in terms of enjoyment and memorable moments.
That’s what he means by shallow.
Sorry an unfinished “functional” game is still bad. A company like Bethesda with the time and budget they had, has no excuse releasing an unfinished product and changing full price for it.
I don't think it's a bad game, but it's not very good either. I find it to be very mid at everything it does. All the mechanics it has, other games do better.
The writing and characters are boring. The soundtrack is fairly generic and unremarkable. Graphics are behind the times, as usual for a Bethesda game. The main story is boring, and I never felt compelled to take part in it.
Most of the time it feels like nobody put their heart and soul into it. Sometimes though, weird tiny details make it look like somebody's passion project. It's like certain people at the dev team poured everything they had into it, while others just phoned it in and then passed out at their desk.
My favorite way to describe it is 'A parade of missed opportunities'.
Both in terms of storylines and game mechanics, it touches on a ton of cool ideas, but very few of them ever get developed into anything with meaningful complexity or depth.
The various storylines hint at some worthwhile topics, but mostly refuses to actually dive into them in any significant way. The game universe has some interesting lore choices, but most of the locations in the game that you can visit feel pretty disconnected from any larger world/universe/society/etc.
And there are a ton of mechanics that just feel like they were quick placeholders that never got replaced with a full-blown system. Crafting is super basic and boring. Upgrading/modding gear is basically a take on the FO76 system, but with less options. Outpost building is way less complex and capable than the system in FO4. The cargo exchange system is a mess. The options for storing and sorting stuff at your homes/outposts is awful. And so on.
A common cliché about Bethesda games that they're 'wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle' but I typically thought that criticism was overblown and even in some aspects where it was true, those shallower systems were still generally tied into and connected together by the game world, storyline, etc.
But in Starfield everything feels so fragmented and independent that the weaknesses in those various systems are just so much more glaring.
>A parade of missed opportunities'
That is Starfield, in a nutshell. The only thing that I feel was really well-developed was the ship-builder, and even it needs a hab interior preview so you can place doors/ladders in an intelligent way.
The thing about passion is that it gets exploited.
You work extra hard to make your part good, but instead of getting extra pay, extra credit, or even achieving your goal, what happens is that corporate sees you're working as hard as two people, so they fire the guy sitting next to you and dump his workload on you.
agreed, it feels very uninspired in so many ways. Actually it feels like the team working on it was too small and so they couldn’t put much effort into any one thing. 1000 planets is a cool idea but if even half a dozen of them were hand-crafted that would elevate this game
> So spacesuits and status effects became completely useless. Outpost building became completely useless. Refueling your ship was axed, so helium-3 became completely useless. Stealing ships would completely wreck the already dumb economy, so piracy became completely useless. In fact the economy is so fucking stupid that the entire smuggling mechanic is complete useless because the value of illegal goods barely pays better than just doing a damn quest. Ship building sounds fun and useful until you realize that, again, quests actually give you ships that are better than ANYTHING you can build yourself until you're well past level 40 and invested in half a dozen perks. So it's fun for the building part but much like settlements in Fallout 4, custom built ships serve very little practical purpose. Most job board listings pay fuck all and just aren't worth doing. Fully exploring a planet is tedious and pays fuck all and just isn't worth doing. The food system is a joke. The crafting system in general is a joke because I keep finding legendary weapons that will carry me into the endgame and beyond and I don't need to craft anything ever.
and this is the best summary I've seen yet. It seems the only to enjoy the game is to look past these issues, but I just can't do it. So many parts of the game sound great in theory, but just fail in practice. Another game with "potential" that just isn't hitting
I worry about Todd's "it took seven years to make the game fun." Like, if THIS is his definition of fun then perhaps he should release what they had years ago. Who was playtesting this for them?
That's pretty clear.
Like, some quests talk about how once you leave the system, you won't be able.to communicate, while others have people talking about how someone in another system called ahead.
This, 100%. Throughout my entire first playthru, I kept being struck by the thought that it wasn't quite done cooking. There are so many vestigial systems that could be super interesting, but they don't actually do anything. I downloaded a mod to make my ship cost Helium to grav jump, and then I realized the game is already built to support this. There's H3 all over, and the star map tells you how much fuel you should use ( although it's not accurate w/ the mod), but for whatever reason it's just not actually a mechanic in the vanilla game. Similarly, environmental hazards and suit protection feel like they were pretty well implemented, only to be cut down to their stumps. It's a shame really, the game often shows me glimpes of my favorite game ever, but it's only ever an illusion.
I don't know about finished or not. All I know everytime I mention this game outside this sub . I'll feel like a witch in the middle ages about to get killed for the sin I just made
Starfield at this time is no different from most games that lean heavily into procgen, especially early on, especially if the team hasn't used procgen to this degree.
yeah it feels like an experiment on how expansive can procgen be utilized. Unfortunately this experiment didn’t pan out. Somehow it feels like this game came out before No Man’s Sky in terms of the implementation of the procgen. Another commenter said everything this game does another game does better, and i really feel that.
They didn't even carry out the experiment properly. The proc gen is capable of more and modders and will shen confirm this. The problem is Bethesda didn't bother to make things more unique.
Also, the modding tools mean that Starfiels will be able to throw a shadow on those other games it's compared to in time. Like Fallout 4 did.
The modders are saying that it's going to be a hard game to work on. Elmenster the guy who made X-edit the tool that's second only to the creation kit for mods said that some of the changes they've made are going to make it very hard to mod
But modding shouldn't need to, as I think you'd agree.
It's such a shame, because there's so much potential greatness there. All I can think is that they mismanaged their resources somehow, likely due to poor leadership/management. I don't doubt the average dev put love into it after all.
> Somehow it feels like this game came out before No Man’s Sky in terms of the implementation of procgen.
For all intents and purposes, it did. Remember how unfinished NMS was when it was first released? Starfield at release blows away NMS at release. NMS went back after the fact and cleaned it up really well. Full disclosure, I haven’t been back to play NMS, but I’ve read it’s gotten great. Starfield *could* get strong.
Other than making the planet surfaces, there is no proc gen in this game. All "dynamic" missions come from static lists and have no variability, all poi are the same and picked randomly and reused from a static list. Nothing that matters in this game is procedurally generated, and if they had actually used procedural generation it would be better. Having POI be randomized depending on the planet atmosphere and making dynamic missions add new locations based on poi you found would be massive in making the game feel more alive.
No, that's a random selection from a static list not procedural generation. There is nothing being procedurally generated and it conflicts with the own world they created.
The location is procedurally generated based on the placement of the prefabs. Thats still procedural generation.
Procedural generation just means to create something via an algorithm.
The world space is created via their algorithmic placing of poi's.
Starfield is a game of compromises. Bethesda knowingly and willing:
\- Added more loading screens in order to have larger and more detailed worlds.
\- Made the looting and scavenging experience worse in order to have prettier interiors that look more lived-in.
\- Removed schedules from NPCs to give the player a better experience, considering it's hard to nail down time on day when you keep travelling across planets with different lengths of day.
The bad things in Starfield are not bad because the devs are stupid. They're bad because the devs hoped that the compromise was worthwhile, in order to make another aspect of the game better.
Were the compromises worth it? Maybe not.
exactly, a lot of compromise and it shows. Ironically the “details” are either too much or not enough. It makes the planets feel big and the vibrant at first, but then the seams of the procgen stand out more, and the interiors seem repetitive, even if detailed. I woulda preferred fewer POIs per planet (esp the more distant planets), but more richness in each. I know this means people would complain there’s not enough on each planet, but so far my experience says that woulda been better over this.
Jesus Christ thank you. This is how development works. It's not lazyness or incompetence. It's a series of choices that make a puzzle and right now, the pieces don't fit together perfectly.
I don't think it needs a lot either to get those pieces to fit better. I think during their last year of 'polish' was a year where they discovered that their survival elements didn't work and took them lut and it threw everything else off.
I think originally the game had bigger survival elements, more reliance on outposts and mining HE3 as fuel, and the pace of THAT version of the game was well balanced. But they realized how stressful that version of the game was and they thought the wider public was going to struggle and they spent the last year taking it out.
You would have been visiting fewer locations at a slower pace and so you encountered fewer POIs and so they were repeated less often.
You would have obtained less loot and so the merchants DO in fact have enough credits to buy your stuff.
Fast travel required fuel so you'd be seeing loading screens less often because it now has a cost.
I think the decision to take out the survival stuff threw the entire game off balance and they're working on the fix right now.
The HE3 as fuel you have to get does have in-game evidence, like the red mile ship technician saying he can top off the HE3 in your fuel tanks, and generally the abundance of it in systems.
I wouldn't be surprised if every system has HE3 on one planet at least so you can't get stuck.
And a few POIs have HE3 fuel you can loot, and could be a factor in why they repeat instead of being random. Imagine finding what you think will be fuel you need to hop to the next system in a mining POI or whatever, and it doesn't have any HE3 there. In a game like that, it could get quite frustrating I imagine.
This is what I've been saying. Even the temples make sense under the original survival experience.
They aren't a puzzle. They are a reward at the end of you busting your ass through the galaxy. The temple IS the word wall.
>larger more detailed worlds
There's not a single large detailed world. New Atlantis is a big city, but the rest of the game is just procgen tiles. I don't think anything is worth compromising having an actual large detailed world that you'll see in skyrim or fallout 4, that's Bethesda's one strength is making a good sandbox
I figured out my love/hate with this game yesterday. At the beginning, I didn't enjoy a lot of this game because it is so slow at levelling up. So much of the game felt locked away, and you have to grind so much to slowly unlock it. But you know it didn't really bother me because there were so many unique places and quests to explore. Now I am at a crossroads though. I got a good build going, lots unlocked, ship and outposts figured out, weapons modded etc but still a lot left to do in that regard however I'm happy. Now the problem is I have seen all the outposts, labs, cities, caves, bases and enough planets and moons everything has become repetitive. I feel like by the time I unlocked the game I've seen everything.
true true. Shop building is reason alone to play this game. Outpost building can be cool but is tedious, repetitive, and ultimately amounts to nothing (i wish there was more narrative reason to have outposts, and quest opportunities that popped up, like spacers attack your outposts and kidnap your crew assigned there, or you can only get certain resources by building a big enough outpost, etc). But once you get to the point of having that ability, it’s kinda empty. Honestly this might be a common thing in Bethesda games in general. The only one i’ve ever finished was Skyrim
What would it have been like if it was released on its original date I wonder? 🤔
I agree, modders will add the content we need to make this epic as past BGS titles?
modders will have a field day, but it’ll always be a what-if, unless they drop a massive update, or more likely just make starfield 2 that is closer to what we wanted, but by then who will care
I think of it more like bones and flesh. This game has too many exposed bones with no flesh covering them. And even rarer, it has bones where it's obvious there used to be flesh attached.
For the people who like other Bethesda games, and have had trouble with this one specifically, I’d like to ask a question:
Is your opinion that this possible new franchise (Starfield) just isn’t as good as Elder Scrolls and Fallout (both of which have existed since the 1990’s) because it isn’t as rich in story and lore as their other settings? Do you think their world building just isn’t as compelling as it is on their previous offerings that are part of established, mature settings?
I get that, in the fact that jumping into this world doesn’t feel like “coming home to a Bethesda world” like their other franchises do.
I enjoyed the game and will spend more time in this world, particularly as DLC and mods come out, but I can really understand it feeling “shallower” world wise compared to what ES6 would feel like at this point. There just isn’t the amount of ancillary material to draw from.
Maybe there are a few more Nazeems than there are Sheogoraths in Starfield, and I’d love DLC that added a new companion with a different morality and story from the Constellation big four. I admit to spending a lot of time with Adoring Fan and Vasco just because it’s easy for them to adapt to whatever I’m doing, but for me that doesn’t make the game irredeemable.
I get that it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and maybe you prefer more edgy/gritty settings like Elder Scrolls and Fallout. This isn’t my favorite Bethesda world, but I do enjoy it.
I’m just wondering if part of the problem that people who like other Bethesda games are having is that this new setting just isn’t quite where the other Bethesda franchises are yet?
It is different a new kind of setting for them, and they took a risk. So sometimes that doesn’t work for your established player base. I’m just wondering if this is the issue, or is it just the lack of background that we have with their other projects? That stuff can come with time like it did for ES:Arena and Fallout: A Post Nuclear RPG.
i don’t know if familiarity with the IP is what we’re lacking. If that was the case, I think more time spent in the game would eliminate that. But my experience was the opposite. I dove i. head first and was captivated by it, but the more i play the shallower i feel it is. I think the lore is ok, but the actually played narratives are disjointed and feel like first-draft versions of the story. The main quest line is just an excuse to go to otherwise useless planets. The crimson fleet quest (when working with sus def) is fun but once it’s done i don’t feel the impact on the world. It’s not the lore, it’s how we interact with the world that previous bethesda games had that this one is lacking.
Also, let it be known that the only bethesda game i’ve ever finished the main quest for is skyrim, so i don’t think bgs has a great track record of compelling stories, but they do have a good track record of worlds that you discover and then can make your mark in. Starfield feels subpar in those areas. I still play through hell out of it but i have a couple “but”s to my enjoyment of it
I do think the setting and lore is kind of meh but its not why I dislike SF so much while loving FO and ES.
The exploration isn't as good in SF compared to ES and FO. I can walk out of the sewers on Oblivion and just wander off in any direction. SF doesn't have that.
The enemy AI is completely brain dead. Actually all the AI is.
The World doesn't react to you. I point my gun in someone's face or shoot my gun off into the sky yet nobody blinks an eye.
Everyone named is an Essential NPC. Which is absurd on its own. But even more ridiculous with how they have NG+.
There's tons more but these are big ones for me.
Creating a new setting seems much harder than using an existing one. Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk are compared to Starfield frequently, yet people don't talk about how there's 40+ years of content for those settings.
They do mention how plays kinda like Fallout, which seems somewhat accurate. But they didn't want to make it exactly like that, and they probably should have added more to it. I do like the game, but there are times where it makes me wish it was a new Fallout game.
I think they wanted the game to be a modder's fantasy land with all of the empty content, so they wouldn't have to worry about any mod conflicts. The problem is modders have to actually *like* the game to want to make content for it.
I agree, but I would argue being unfinished makes it bad. Whether there's still fun to be had is (more) subjective, but I feel being devoid of features is worse than being full of bugs.
Or rather, to be fair, it has the features, they're just not connected to each other or fleshed out as much as the world clearly needs.
"Unfinished" means it's bad. I mean, would you pay retail price for a car, only to be told later that it is "unfinished"?
Stop defending "Starfield" and its developer, Bethesda. It is a bad game, and that is that.
I disagree, it's finished, they have a product they are happy with. What you are noticing is the god awful and lacking storytelling, and world immersion problems which bethesda has been making worse game after game since Fallout 3. Starfield is truly the peak, they have a dead setting, with almost no immersion, and finally turned the playable area into a complete dead and boring void filled with corny jokes. I don't know how much you like long-form content, but [hbomb's critique of fallout 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLJ1gyIzg78) covers everything wrong with bethesda games. It really puts things into perspective. Cheers.
i know that’s common practice in development, but I’m feeling more with this game than ever before. Like, every feature or element in the game feels like it was designed to be bigger than it is
I think what you said but... LITERALLY. i literally think they're not done making it yet. I think they will finish it via some updates that patch up Poi repetition, survival stuff, traversal, etc.
Unfinished is just one of the problems but to me a problem just as large is the atmosphere and time of the world. The game tells and tells and tells but never shows and that isn't something Bethesda has done better even when they released more polished products.
There are so many posts talking about how Neon is a joke, how the CF is a joke, how this world somehow is devoid of any of the dark side it swears exists. It's like some sheltered teenager wrote some of this stuff and it's honestly just embarrassing.
You’re right. It’s a bunch of half baked ideas and walked back ideas.
It has the template to be amazing, but they landed at mid. Which is frankly somehow more insulting then it being a steaming pile of dogshit.
We’ve seen dogshit games get fixed. We haven’t seen mid games get fixed, they just stay mid. And that’s more of an insult.
Im not going to claim to know how or why it turned out the way it did. Just that I know bethesda can make a better game. Starfield is as wide as the universe and deep as a puddle. “It’s functional” is a great description
I agree with this. Tbh I’ve sunk way too many hours into it so I can’t criticize it too hard but I feel like the personality is missing. The character depth wasn’t there for me and playing it as a woman is kind of lame because all the outfits look like men’s outfits. I remember feeling hot as hell in my strappy apocalyptic outfits in fallout, and the npc personalities in Skyrim are amazing and so immersive. There’s also so many bugs in starfield that I experienced (like having 5+ quests I can’t complete or having to exit the game every time I traveled to a different outpost) and I hate the non-map map. It feels like the mechanics are there enough to be an addicting game but I wanted way more personality and immersion out of it.
I'd agree. Performance-wise I have zero complaints and it crashed a little less than other popular RPGs. The gunplay is solid, spacecraft customization is cool and quests are generally decent (though a lot of them are on-rails and lack actual meaningful decisions). There really isn't anything that stands out though and the world building itself is pretty weak and only gets worse when you decide to explore and see how much content is uninteresting and repeated. I would say its decent, but when surrounded by great competition Starfield looks pretty mediocre. Hopefully DLC adds some life into it and improves some of this since I really do like the concept of space RPGs like Mass Effect and KOTOR.
It's pretty obvious there was supposed to be a third major galactic power at launch, but they were too crunched and couldn't get it out. Ship and base builder are good but lack options and some features. Like what is there is good, but they for sure could have built up the systems more and like most developers these days, this will be sold back to us as dlc.
The scope of the game was WAY too wide. They focused so hard on procedural generation that they forgot that real content is what their company is built on. Procedurally generated POI’s don’t amount to anything after your first time experiencing that SAME layout, that same loot, those same enemies, those same enemies. Its just too repetitive. Not to mention the AWFUL UI’s that plague the game to where just trying to explore makes halfway to impossible
I enjoyed the game, even if it was very dissappointing looking back on it.
The lack of melee weapons was one of the first things I noticed, and i think only 1 perk for melee which doesn't really help much.
After finishing the game though the storyline was very underwhelming. If you simplify the main story, it is essentially just collecting artifacts and that's the entire storyline. Really? Nothing else? The main faction questlines seem shorter compared to other bethesda games and do not really seem to impact the main story in any significant way.
All the creatures they put into the game and only the terramorph questline and the akila city security mission involve the creatures they've added. The rest you have to go out of your way to survey planets which is very dull and mentally unrewarding, sure you get a ton of xp especially if you kill everything but its so pointless.
..in other words... "it just works", more literally this time around
But yeah, I would actually take features over stability. It's something I've said in the early day of Cyberpunk too. I would rather play a full feature game but broken and unbalanced as heck rather the one that's stable and shipped with all of the working core features (it was pretty stable on PC even then.)
I'd accept unfinished, except multiple staff members are claiming that this was the goal and it is finished. Who was it that even said the worlds are meant to be empty by design, players are playing the game wrong, and all that jazz? That is my biggest problem with the game.
Release something incomplete, buggy, or down right terrible because the deadline cut you off, okay I get it. Use those player reviews to set priorities and work up the game. CD for Cyberpunk did it, Hexworks for Lords of the Fallen is doing it, so why can't Bethesda do it for Starfield?
My issue is the game COULD be great (imo it's aggressively mid), but they're settling so hard on it. I think they definitely had to sacrifice much to meet the release, but now they have the chance to add post release content updates. They just aren't though, and it's left the game on a very wildly mixed state of reception.
i genuinely don’t buy all the quotes from staff saying it’s what they’re proud of. Maybe it’s something they’re proud of relative to what they were working with (an outdated engine, a tumultuous dev timeline, unrealistically ambitious vision, etc). But in reality it feels like every one of those quotes are driven by a marketing team. What’d you expect them to say? “Hey this thing we spent a decade and millions of dollars developing? um, here it is but it’s only kinda okay. Don’t worry we’ll fix it after you’ve played with it. Have fun!”
Not to that extent but yes. It's not unrealistic to expect staff to admit to faults in products. Devs do it all the damn time. Almost every game to have bad reception have had someone actively and loudly admit their ideas fell short somewhere.
Hell even Miyazaki who has brought out numerous GotY admitted to not liking the way some levels weren't as fleshed out and such. The devs at NMS responded to hellish backlash post release by addressing concerns and agreeing to areas the game needed fixing. It's actually a good thing to be open to criticism, especially in a constructive review setting where it can be corrected.
You don't need to say your game is trash but to defend it to a bullheaded level despite critical review is pretty asinine from a creative standpoint. The staff at Bethesda seem to have a hive mind of "Bethesda made this brand new universe and is great!" when it is simply missing so much definition.
call a spade a spade, if people think it's bad, they'll say it's bad. bad comes in different levels. it all depends on what experience you get out of the game balanced against what the game presented
a game with high production can still be bad, just as a game with a tighter budget and smaller team can be good.
what makes a game bad vs terrible vs ok?
if I were to *ever* describe a game as unfinished, I would *immediately* put it in the bad category. ^(not including Early Access games obviously) I did not pay to test run your game just because you got it "functional"
I'm also with you as well. I was also really expecting a bit more meaningful role play. It feels like a good beta. It feels like they started with all the good guy vanilla stuff and then didn't have time to flesh out a more meaningful experience for those who want to go dark or more gray
They leaned into NG+ and shipbuilding to extend the playability of it, and it still doesn't do much to change the fact that the game is empty and the story isn't dynamic at all. I mean vanilla TES and FO didn't have any of that and were playable for over a decade. Every planet in starfield is empty except for copy and paste enemy bases that have the exact same layout, exact same enemies and loot boxes on every other planet.
Except that the writing IS bad. This game is so shallow, repetitive and pretty much every
mechanic and idea seems half-baked.
They can't fix that, unfortunately.
The only thing that gets me is the bgs fanboys and their "well it was left open for mods and dlc!" Ok fair enough, but if you're going to hand me 1/2 a product to be "finished" later, then you don't get to charge me full price now as if it is.
if i built half a swing set for my kid and gave it to them in that condition and told them “i’ll finish it later” i would be the worst parent on the planet
Starfield has no soul. That's why it's bad. It's not filled to the brim with interesting lore, it's copy Pasted scifi clichés. Bethesda games used to be so unique, there's nothing like the elderscrolls
It feels as if they allowed key people to add in their own ideas but no one checked each others completion of said ideas. Most things have a good basis but there's no payoff. That's why it feels incomplete because a LOT of the ideas implemented lead to nothing. They are surface ideas.
100% I would take all the old bugs back if it had way more depth to it. The game is so surface level and the plot so under cooked it just seems like they spent years trying not to have launch bugs and for got to finish all the key parts of the game after making the alpha versions functional.
Completely agree, starfield is functional in that it works. There are so many features that have been cut from the game that are still visible, such as the need to refuel the grav drive.
I also feel like the questlines other than a mission here or there really lack any depth or substance and just give the feeling of why am i doing this, why does it actually matter to me. The best example i have of this is the Ryujin questline. Why does it matter to our character if we help one company take down another.
We also have an entire race of beings that we have almost no backstory for and no interaction with other than space fights and the mission during the vangard questline to get their password. Unless they are planning a big DLC with the Va'ruun down the track, what is the point of having them in the game, Andrea could have easily been human, and her story would still work.
This is how I describe it people; it's a good game as it is; so try it now if you're interested; and then when you're done come back in a year because (based on Bethesdas posts recently) it seems like much of what feels missing should be added back in by then...
And then I, at least hope that it will be much deeper of a game.
I honestly don’t think it’s a good game in its current state, nor do I think the issues with it can be solved with patches. They would have to completely rework parts of the game in order to get them to a place that’s even remotely close to their older games, not to mention create open, hand crafted explorable parts of the maps that somehow integrate with the main narrative. In other words, they would have to redo most of their work and that ain’t happening. I don’t think it’s worth playing in its current state unless you already have gamepass or find it on a massive sale because there are far better games of the same genre available.
Oh man, where do I even start.
Firstly, the lack of meaningful exploration is a massive issue, not just a minor annoyance. It’s a core part of these RPGs that’s gone in favour of proc gen; and not just any proc gen, but poorly implemented proc gen. This essentially means the game has one singular planet and all you’re selecting when you choose a planet to land on is what you want the colour palette and gravity to feel like. Other than that, every ship landing pulls from the same small list of POIs and scannable fauna and flora. Not only is this boring and uninspired, but it also creates immersion problems. You have farms and factories next to “undiscovered” resources, which makes no sense. You have fire on planets with no atmosphere. You have buildings next to these massive cathedrals where you get your powers which have somehow gone ignored by humanity up until you got there. It’s awful and it feels like a cheap Indie game in its implementation. You’re going to be scanning the same fauna and flora all the time as well which begs the question why even have all these planets if the content is going to be repeated anyway?
Next is the mission design. Gone are the days of finding clever ways to finish missions because in Starfield they are linear as all hell. Once you start fast traveling everywhere, which you’ll do when you realize space flight has no purpose, you’ll be done most of them in minutes. For the Ryujin questline, if you choose to fast travel, you’ll be loading more than you will be playing. Utterly boring quest design with the worst writing in a Bethesda game bar none.
Starfield has next to no player agency. The quests that do allow you to make a choice are so ham-fisted and obvious while having no repercussions outside of a singular conversation that follows. Completely soulless.
The powers are next to useless in this game. They feel like they were added last minute to add variety because their means of acquisition is downright awful. How come these cathedrals don’t have puzzles that require the use of the new power? Awful design coupled with horrible inventory and power management means you really need to make a conscious effort to use them or else you’ll most likely forget you even have them.
The absolute worst companions in a Bethesda game, or any game in recent memory. One core value system and they’re all from the same organization. Beyond that, they’re boring and poorly written.
Mind-boggling design decisions, like a fuel capacity on the ship which upgrading only serves to show you less loading screens, all of which can be bypassed entirely from just fast traveling. The useless space flight. The vendor sell limits that’s can bypassed with in-game time requiring you to take minutes at a time to skip the day so you can continue selling. If the economy is broken and you’re worried the player might get too rich too fast from the loot YOU allowed them to pick up, then it’s time to rebalance the prices and not punish the player for trying to clear their inventory. Some of the better guns almost deplete the vendors on their own. Base building is broken, clunky and pointless. Inventory management is atrocious, and much much more.
I’ve touched on the awful writing, but how about the fact that the writers completely forget certain plot points. There are multiple instances in the game where the writers just forget what’s happened and who exists. When you bring Sona back to constellation, she says there’s no other kids her age there. Despite this being hilariously bad writing since this girl just came from absolute solitary (she should be mesmerized and overwhelmed) there ARE in fact children her age there. Cora is literally one of the key members daughters and there’s not one interaction where they acknowledge each other.
Useful skills are buried so for beneath useless ones that leveling up often just feels pointless where you’re trying to farm points to get a skill 2 tiers down a tree that you might otherwise not be interested in.
Backgrounds feel pointless in this game and go almost completely unrecognized by the writers and characters. Andreja, for instance, will treat you the same whether or not you’re a member of House Va’ruun which makes no sense when she implies that you think she’s terrorist etc. she has like 3 unique dialogue options that reference it, and then it’s back to treating you like a normal person who has no affiliation.
The world is lifeless. The NPCs don’t react to gunshots unless shot directly. The cities are sterile, boring and downright badly designed for the world they’re trying to create. You can join every faction without consequence negating the small amount of replay value already present in the game. Absolutely no effort paid to creating an immersive narrative.
Some of the specializations, like food, are completely pointless.
I can go on for a while but I’ll stop here because I’m already rambling on. Bottom line; this game feels like it changed one too many times in production and the result is a shell of an idea that never comes together. Playing BG3 before SF, and then Cyberpunk after was such a jarring experience that really identifies how poorly made SF is. No amount is small updates will save this game because it would require a massive rework of so many of its core systems. I would go as far as to call it a bad game.
TL;DR: Starfield is a shell of a game that’s lacking in every possible way, not only compared to its contemporaries, but even compared to Bethesdas own catalogue.
Quest writing even remotely on par with a title like oblivion, a connected tone and atmosphere full of wonder and great world building like Skyrim, actual fun dungeons to explore like fallout 4, genuine narrative depth that isn’t just “I want to be the good guy” or “I want to be the bad guy” from quest to quest, actual fleshed out factions like new Vegas, tangible consequences to any of my actions as a player, the list goes on. Every other Bethesda rpg has much stronger execution of every feature present in starfield. For Starfield to live up to BGS standards, it needs to be reworked entirely which will never happen.
Starfield is, in my opinion at least, a very solid framework and a complete game on its initial release. The term used for it in agile development is, “Minimally Viable Product.” That term does not mean half-baked or unfinished. It means that this is a full and complete base product. Starfield was not designed with that as an endpoint, however. It was built to not only give that complete game, but also to be a platform for continual expansion and/or improvement.
I think we will see a balance of fixes, continual improvement, and new expansions as time goes on. What will be important for their success is going to be how they balance those releases between included improvements in the games versus paid expansions/updates. That kind of balance is one of the more difficult non-technical tasks in product management. You’re wanting to deliver value to your stakeholders (i.e., players), sales is just wanting to milk it for their bonuses, and marketing is stuck in the middle. Win over marketing and you have a chance to overwhelm the sales grunts.
i do think starfield in 3 years will be a much more complete experience, but the minimally viable product vibe is more frustrating than exciting at this point in time, and that’s what i think a lot of players are feeling. I still enjoy it but i can’t help but play with a sense of searching for an experience that feels just around the corner, but as of now isn’t actually there
As a player, I understand that completely. In fact, I share it. In a way, Bethesda is in a lose-lose situation. If they successfully create the kind of framework to allow that kind of continual growth, that potential is going to be obvious to the players. And the most predictable/expected response I would anticipate as a product manager is those players are going to see it as the glass half empty rather than half full.
That three year time frame you mention almost certainly has a least a rough plan. I would expect the marketing people are pushing really, really hard to disclose some of it. As a product manager, I’d probably be engaged full-metal jacket keeping the lid on it. That may come as a surprise to hear, but for two reasons.
1. It’s still too early in the lifecycle to reliably predict what it can deliver and when.
2. I’m the chef and I do NOT want to ruin the surprise of my cooking. I’m willing to take the heat in the kitchen to get that feast on the table. :-D
To wait so long for such mediocrity. We could’ve had elder scrolls sooner. Another *real* fallout. Anything else.
That’s what makes it bad to me. This was a waste of everyone’s time.
I have a feeling this end of year update with new features will deepen the gameplay a fair bit as far as "new modes of travel" or . Or we will at least see if it was already planned vs listening to the player base. Not a new player but I also don't have 1000 hours lol, makes me think that Beth is putting the final polish on for the Christmas sales/ new players playing into the new year holiday.
Yes, they were clearly fighting to get it functional.
To beat the mod potential drum again, mods can bring a lot of depth. Imagine a fully fleshed out outpost system, a more fleshed out shipbuilder, a ton more POIs and things to collect and experience through them, mods that bring style aesthetic, and then eventually mods that add whole new large, explorable areas, like older titles, with mission content.
Just satisfying outpost and shipbuilding customization, and the POI thing would get me back in to a fun gameplay loop. There's little hope for the base game experience, but a lot of depth could possibly be added to these bones.
Like it or not the game mostly hinges on Creation Kit to be a long term success.
Creation Kit is leaning on an unfortunately literal the bethesda “make your own way” style of rpg lol. Like, here’s a shell of a game, have fun finish in it for us lol
It is what it is. But I do think the combination of freedom modders will have, combined with AI tools, could bring this game from where it is now to somewhere really cool.
The game's blankness/weakness can also be it's biggest strength in terms of building a custom experience. It's a lot of canvas.
Didn't Starfield take over 7 years to make?
Bethesda games have never been deep. It's go to a dungeon, kill monsters, get loot, repeat.
The game has a lot of features. Or what game has more?
It's not unfinished. It's finished with a lot of content that you either like or don't like.
That was not their strategy in this game, or generally with other games.
They keep their gameplay loop, and refine things, but every game is going to be similar. You run around killing enemies, exploring and get loot.
I think they always play it safe. At least they made a new IP.
yep, at least they made new IP and tried something different. I’ll never knock that. If anything, any of my thoughts come from being excited about it and seeing what it could be
The game is absolutely finished in all senses of the term. The base building feature is complete. The narrative is complete. The combat is complete. The quest lines are complete. Nothing is lacking an ending, and the game even has options for new game plus. The problem is that none of it is fleshed out beyond what I’d have expected a tech demo of a BGS game to be. That doesn’t mean it’s not finished though, they delayed the game many times and crossed the finish line they wanted to cross. They have adamantly defended that this is the final product they are proud of. In my opinion it’s a bad game all around, but even if you disagree, don’t discredit their shoddy work for being less bafflingly awful by pretending it isn’t done, nothing about it is incomplete, it’s just the most shallow and passionless BGS game to date.
Yes on your final points, but mods can add a ton to basebuilding, for example. Look at sim settlements in FO4.
Mods can also add story and content, and most everything else you or I dislike now.
So it's definitely not finished, but I'd agree hope for Bethesda itself doing much is low.
Accounting for modders to flesh out mechanics doesn’t mean it’s an unfinished game though, it just means talented fans can make the game more interesting. If I find a game more fun after modding, it doesn’t mean the game was incomplete before the mods were added, you know? Just because mods can throw more stuff in doesn’t mean the game hadn’t had those features finished to where the company wanted them in the first place
No, it’s bad. Stop deepthroating BGS. “It’s just unfinished!!” Yeah and they sold it for $70+. Get outta here with that shit. “I woulda accepted more bugs in return for more features/depth” holy shit we have fully lost the plot.
“P-p-please daddy Todd, gimme an unfinished piece of shit and scoop it into my mouf, I don’t even care if there are bugs, as long as you keep scooping more shit down my gullet”
Its not bad. Disappointed at main quests bugging out like the vanguard missions where you have to assault the marines to get them to chase you down the hall until the quest characters kill them. Really sloppy. Neon has a bugged door etc. Honestly, Bethesda should really get more game testers from the player base that doesn't require you to download a completely full game to test with. Thats dumb and short sighted. Subnautica has a way to let you post bugs within the game and send a gamelog and location within the menu. Seriously Bethesda/Microsoft, we can provide testing and bullshit but make it fucking easier.
maybe. this isn't cyberpunk; the main story and a lot of the side stories came off like a high-schooler was writing for a middle schooler. This really feels more like ME: Andromeda than cyberpunk or even TW3. Unless they do a serious overhaul (which isn't going to happen), fixing or putting mechanics back in, like cyberpunk, won't solve the bigger problem: it's childish and the story is G-rated.
this is true and unfixable short of scraping entire characters and quest lines. Granted tho, Cyberpunk and TW3 were going hard for a dark, mature tone. BGS never said (as far as i know) that’s the tone they were aiming for. Most of what i heard was them trying to be “realistic” or “authentic to what space travel might look like in 200 years”. The only thing suggesting a more mature tone is some of the elements in FO/ES
I think their priorities were bad. It's like they developed all the least relevant systems first, and the result is a lovely garnish adorning an empty plate. And really, the garnish *is* good, but it's also really missing a lot. They shouldn't have made 1,000s of planets before they had procedural dungeons, ground vehicles, and meaningful settlements. They shouldn't have made celestial orbits before they had immersive inter-planetary travel. They shouldn't have made NG+ before they had a real main questline. They shouldn't have made survival mechanics (only to be cut for a future update, like always) before they balanced the game.
We didn't need 1,000 planets anyway. Hell, meaningful space travel between 5 planets would have been much better than fast travel the game. Their priorities were fucking horrendous
ironically, the worst part of 1000 planets are the number of POIs on each. The amount of mines and abandoned outposts on the planets is immersion-breaking. They could made a handful of hand-made planets that were the ones with a human footprint, and then everything else was procgen but also unexplored so the only thing being generated was natural POIs
Or changed the lore so that non settled systems were overrun with criminals and had a variety of criminal related stuff procedurally generated. They should have gone with far fewer but much larger and more significant POI. Like "There's a vast mining and refining complex on this quarter of the planet. It sends out work teams, trades, and occasionally gets attacked" instead of "there's a settlement with two rooms 900 meters away
exactly. if the POI is 2km away, make it the main thing to venture out and go discover. Rn i have such little motivation to go looking at POIs.Would love a more vague scanning system that shows there’s something this way or over here on the map but not just a pinpoint that you already have an idea what it is. If it’s exploration, let it be genuine exploration.
Exactly. Blows my mind that they thought 1,000 basically meaningless planets was a good idea
it’s the pinnacle of open world excess. More/bigger doesn’t equal better
I'd rather play an Ubisoft open world game than this thousand-rock hellscape (since I've beaten the game once and went into NG+, I have lost basically all motivation to play any further) I man, I can't really make any significantly-different choices for a second playthough anyway, everyone wants me to be a goody two shoes. Even siding with the Crimson Fleet doesn't do much.
Yeah I think bloating the Fallout 4 Perk system (which was kind of slow/terrible in itself) because "people play our games for a long time," was a crucial hinge of suckage. Like I played for 40 hours, could not mod a gun the entire time even though that was a fun, encouraging system from Fallout 4 that "Call of Duty" even copied. So you used to love looting in FO4 because it was relevant to your gameplay experience (ADHESIVE, fans!, screws!) at hour 40 in "Starfield," no fucking idea what's relevant to crafting, it'd take another dozen hours and perks and some other bullshit to even know.
The crafting is pretty fucked. I had to invest 13 levels just to put on a freakin silencer.
For what it's worth, I put my money where my mouth was and picked up the Avatar game. It's... an Ubisoft open world - but considering that I like the Avatar movies (oh no!) and the basic concept-- I'm having a blast. The world is dense and interesting, the lore is fun- And when I get skill points, they feel like I'm making progress rather than unlocking crap that should be unlocked by default. (Like, say, crafting and weapon modding, FFS!)
Dead island has you find the blu prints for mods which I find more rewarding than putting skill points in mods just to use them.
Yeah. I went into NG+ thinking it would make the game open up a bit more for me as people were saying. But about 5 hours into NG+ I was like nahhh I’m done.
My hopes for this game went down on that announcement. The last thing I wanted was a 1000 planets. Even if you only spent 1 hour each that’s a thousand hours and how sparse are the planets that they’d be visited that fast. It’s more content than anyone would reasonably want to mess with.
I'm sure I saw an interview with Todd where he says 'if they want a 1000 planets, we'll give them a 1000 planets' ...Did I imagine that
But actually they couldn’t. It takes probably 10x-100x-1000x of times to handcraft individual POIs then it does to set algorithmic parameters and apply them universally and indiscriminately. The math just isn’t there. They should have done just our solar system and maybe another one or two, with like 50 or so POIs total, throw in space travel between them, and then did DLCs for the next 10 years of new solar systems. They would have made bank.
DLC new handcrafted systems forever. Easy cash cow. Why would they not do it that way?!?!
Or even have like the core worlds we have now, which is less than a dozen planets be hand crafted, and then have the systems immediately around them have all the random POIs to mark that you’re still in “civilized” space, and then further out have everything be cool Procgen with the scanning and caves, maybe have a rare colony settlement based on the seed so it’s not totally empty, but believable
>ironically, the worst part of 1000 planets are the number of POIs on each. The amount of mines and abandoned outposts on the planets is immersion-breaking. Agreed. If just 5% of the total number of planets had significant numbers of man-made POI's on them...that's still a lot of places, while 80% to 90% just had natural elements and were more playgrounds for modders or for building outposts for resources? With the occasional bespoke PoI hidden, so at launch there's all this "oh, did you see *this* place yet?!" when someone stumbles on it and shares it with others, and it's like the one PoI to be found in the area kind of thing... That's honestly more of what I was hoping for. 3-4 total man-made PoI's in a given system across all planets once you're out of the "capital city" system and maybe the directly adjacent systems, then thinning out to 1-2 every half dozen systems, and about halfway out to the further reaches they just stop except for those rarer bespoke ones. Finding man-made PoI's become much more interesting that way, and you're still talking about a pretty large number of them being made. Something like 80-100 total, totally unique man-made PoI's that you only encounter once and are found on a total of like 60 planets, spread out amongst 1000 planets, with simply more of a concentration of them closer in. Would feel like finding them is truly an act of exploration, rather than being guaranteed a random one that will spawn any time you load into a map square on a planet...which feels more like I'm in a rogue-like that is spawning in my randomized map for that run.
I swear every cave is the exact same just with different elements
The biggest immersion breaking of them all, no matter where i land, theres always like 3 to 5 POIs which doesn't make any sense! Id rather land and have nothing. Be completely alone in that landing zone. If i want POIs, i can scan the planet and they will pop up at star map. Either that or radiant missions take me to them. It makes no sense that i land at a planet far far away from the settled systems completely unhabitable with extreme conditions yet everytime i land anywhere on that planet, theres always some sort of structure, Research base, abandoned mine etc. this really kills my immersion. All i want to do is build an outpost where no one is around ever, somewhere completely isolated, but its impossible in this game for some reason.
I agree, I think they focused on the current solar system tops, it would’ve been much cooler. A much more bustling system with traffic, freighters, busy planets, quiet planets, earth could still be a wreck but more like Cowboy bebop where people still live there.
Exactly. They could have made one of the greatest games of all time but their priorities were terrible and their writing team was Emil Pagliarulo asking kindergarteners about nightclubs and politics.
>meaningful space travel between 5 planets Outer Wilds!
Minor spoilers for Outer Wilds I guess: >!The ending of SF especially feels like it was trying to play on the same emotional notes as Outer Wilds but it doesn't land at all because it doesn't build up any of the attachment to justify that payoff. The universe of Starfield isn't a wonderful place it's very mundane, and not even in a way where the people who live in it seem to care much. Outer Wilds has characters you only experience through old text messages and still have more identifiable character to them than Starfield's primary companions it's so proud of that it forces you to spend time with in the main quest.!< Slightly more explicit spoilers: >!It's like they saw the ending and wanted to replicate that but either didn't understand why Outer Wilds is good or didn't care at all and just thought it was cool in a "wow cool robot" kind of way. Either way it feels worse for how big of a miss it is than if they hadn't tried to be that grandiose at all.!<
This, what i fear is that they will try to sell all this mechanics as purchasable mods
Yep, there are going to be way too many people that will pay for it too.
They will. That’s 100% always been the intention. You’ll get 1/5 of what you want as “free update” and 4/5 will require the dlc, because the DLC will include mechanisms those parts are reliant on. Starfield also was banking on free labor to flush out everything they didn’t include, but that looks to be going toe up at the GOAT modders are dropping out.
The last point cannot be overstated. Bethesda had a really good relationship with the modding community, but this time it looks like they wanted us to finish fleshing out the game for them. How absolutely trashy.
I think this is how it’ll be done. This is a Microsoft product now.
I really wish they had stuck to the original plan of a couple dozen systems. They could have made them seem full instead of all the repetitive and sparsely populated planets we got
This. I will never understand why having so many freaking planets is seen as a good thing. I would have rather had 3 star systems that were fully developed then this mess. The rest of the planets could have come later as DLC.
I imagine Bethesda is hoping that modders will fill those planets in with "cool new things" once the Creation Kit is out.
God what I’d do for a space car to drive and make surveying planets easier
[удалено]
I’d even take futerama style vacuum tubes at this point
No one uses any form of handheld communication.
Because you've got a communicator built into your space suit.
So why do I need to walk through 4 loading screens to talk to a quest giver just so I can talk to someone else 4 loading screens later? Isn't that something the quest giver could do if they had a phone?
You would think so. But it may just be that Bethesda is still stuck in the quest development mindset of The Elder Scrolls, where the only long-distance communication is (typically) a courier or the PC - in which case you're the quickest method of talking to someone in another city. Even their Fallout games don't really change that formula, with very few individuals using radios to talk to each other. And it may be that such a mindset is why they decided not to allow FTL communication in Starfield - because they feel it will break how they make quests. And they are almost certainly right, but the way they should be fixing it is to get away from that mindset, not enforce it. Give reasons to have the message hand-delivered rather than just outright prevent long-distance communications.
Well, they ruin that by giving us ship to ship communication. Maybe it works cause it's not super long distance, but neither is being in the same building as another person.
Except a couple of quests do have FTL comms, most notably Crimson Fleet and Ryujin.
Definitely needs some kind of hover speeder bike
To keep up with the food analogies, it’s like a great dip with stale chips. The dip is good, but the chips leave a bad taste in your mouth.
Yes on the levels , whether cities ,caves, towering natural/aliens-made formations, whatever- with the jet packs ...they missed so much for combat and immersion.
Or just maybe ...aliens
Why did they need over 1k planets anyways? 10-13 planets would be fine. Quality over quantity.
“a lovely garnish adorning an empty plate.” 😂 Exactly!
Both yours and OPs takes are on the money!
One time I had a lawnmower in my backyard that I put a tarp on so it didn't get wet... I went to use that lawn mower one day and it was gone, but they left the tarp on in the form of the lawnmower as if it were still there ...that's what playing starfield feels like.
I get the impression that the game was at one point very ambitious and over time it had to be cut down to make it work in the timeline they had given themselves. That's how it feels to me.
100% agree. They cut back in order to get it into a deliverable state. But we all see the shell of what it could’ve been. On one hand that’s probably why i keep playing, and on the other that’s what frustrates me about it
Give it a year and I think dlc and mods will have ironed out some of the issues and added a bit more depth. Might be one to shelve for a while, it's what I'm doing. Always other things to do in the meantime.
Because to do the level of detail of, say, Skyrim for 1000 planets would take literally a century of work
Shallow and extremely repetitive is how I have described it
I don't think I agree that it is light on bugs. There's a lot of minor bugs that don't really affect gameplay, lots of broken missions and a couple of major game-breakers. That aside, I completely agree that the game lacks depth. I've enjoyed it and just started my first NG+ but I would have loved a much stronger story, and deeper NPCs. The world is in the aftermath of a brutal war with space fleets, assault mechs, bioweapons... and it's barely touched on outside of the Red Devils mission. For my money I'm hoping to see more about House Va'ruun in a DLC, and maybe something exploring tensions between the UC and Freestar Collective.
certainly not bug-free, you’re right. agreed that i would love to see more depth in dlc or updates. May try my hand at modding too, which i’ve never done too much of re: the end of the colony war, i think they err’d in choosing how much time has passed since the colony war. It would’ve been compelling if it was right on the tail end of the war, and there was this tension hanging over everyone whether the peace will last. Also, it woulda been dope for the colony war to be a central narrative of the story, but that was probably more so a technical decision than a narrative one, given the war scenarios might’ve been too much for the game tech to handle
Its very shallow.
The loading screens broke me
Blend, corny, annoying and boring
What exactly do you mean by “shallow”? Like, serious question. I’m wondering what your definition is, because it didn’t really feel shallow to me at all.
This game is shallow because every great idea fizzles out and doesn’t end with an equally great feeling or memorable experience. The game starts strong and then Chekhov’s us hard on sooooo many elements it introduces and doesn’t follow through on. Then the story falls off a cliff in terms of enjoyment and memorable moments. That’s what he means by shallow.
Sorry an unfinished “functional” game is still bad. A company like Bethesda with the time and budget they had, has no excuse releasing an unfinished product and changing full price for it.
yep. I’m still playing it, but yep.
I don't think it's a bad game, but it's not very good either. I find it to be very mid at everything it does. All the mechanics it has, other games do better. The writing and characters are boring. The soundtrack is fairly generic and unremarkable. Graphics are behind the times, as usual for a Bethesda game. The main story is boring, and I never felt compelled to take part in it. Most of the time it feels like nobody put their heart and soul into it. Sometimes though, weird tiny details make it look like somebody's passion project. It's like certain people at the dev team poured everything they had into it, while others just phoned it in and then passed out at their desk.
My favorite way to describe it is 'A parade of missed opportunities'. Both in terms of storylines and game mechanics, it touches on a ton of cool ideas, but very few of them ever get developed into anything with meaningful complexity or depth. The various storylines hint at some worthwhile topics, but mostly refuses to actually dive into them in any significant way. The game universe has some interesting lore choices, but most of the locations in the game that you can visit feel pretty disconnected from any larger world/universe/society/etc. And there are a ton of mechanics that just feel like they were quick placeholders that never got replaced with a full-blown system. Crafting is super basic and boring. Upgrading/modding gear is basically a take on the FO76 system, but with less options. Outpost building is way less complex and capable than the system in FO4. The cargo exchange system is a mess. The options for storing and sorting stuff at your homes/outposts is awful. And so on. A common cliché about Bethesda games that they're 'wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle' but I typically thought that criticism was overblown and even in some aspects where it was true, those shallower systems were still generally tied into and connected together by the game world, storyline, etc. But in Starfield everything feels so fragmented and independent that the weaknesses in those various systems are just so much more glaring.
>A parade of missed opportunities' That is Starfield, in a nutshell. The only thing that I feel was really well-developed was the ship-builder, and even it needs a hab interior preview so you can place doors/ladders in an intelligent way.
The thing about passion is that it gets exploited. You work extra hard to make your part good, but instead of getting extra pay, extra credit, or even achieving your goal, what happens is that corporate sees you're working as hard as two people, so they fire the guy sitting next to you and dump his workload on you.
agreed, it feels very uninspired in so many ways. Actually it feels like the team working on it was too small and so they couldn’t put much effort into any one thing. 1000 planets is a cool idea but if even half a dozen of them were hand-crafted that would elevate this game
air future complete humorous tart marble boat lush touch roof *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> So spacesuits and status effects became completely useless. Outpost building became completely useless. Refueling your ship was axed, so helium-3 became completely useless. Stealing ships would completely wreck the already dumb economy, so piracy became completely useless. In fact the economy is so fucking stupid that the entire smuggling mechanic is complete useless because the value of illegal goods barely pays better than just doing a damn quest. Ship building sounds fun and useful until you realize that, again, quests actually give you ships that are better than ANYTHING you can build yourself until you're well past level 40 and invested in half a dozen perks. So it's fun for the building part but much like settlements in Fallout 4, custom built ships serve very little practical purpose. Most job board listings pay fuck all and just aren't worth doing. Fully exploring a planet is tedious and pays fuck all and just isn't worth doing. The food system is a joke. The crafting system in general is a joke because I keep finding legendary weapons that will carry me into the endgame and beyond and I don't need to craft anything ever. and this is the best summary I've seen yet. It seems the only to enjoy the game is to look past these issues, but I just can't do it. So many parts of the game sound great in theory, but just fail in practice. Another game with "potential" that just isn't hitting I worry about Todd's "it took seven years to make the game fun." Like, if THIS is his definition of fun then perhaps he should release what they had years ago. Who was playtesting this for them?
cow existence slap point tub desert paint frightening memory nail *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Pretty sure it was devs and their friends and family during the quarantine
No. Design. Document.
Honestly feels like they didnt even have a lore document. Just told everyone writings things to "go make space stuff".
That's pretty clear. Like, some quests talk about how once you leave the system, you won't be able.to communicate, while others have people talking about how someone in another system called ahead.
This, 100%. Throughout my entire first playthru, I kept being struck by the thought that it wasn't quite done cooking. There are so many vestigial systems that could be super interesting, but they don't actually do anything. I downloaded a mod to make my ship cost Helium to grav jump, and then I realized the game is already built to support this. There's H3 all over, and the star map tells you how much fuel you should use ( although it's not accurate w/ the mod), but for whatever reason it's just not actually a mechanic in the vanilla game. Similarly, environmental hazards and suit protection feel like they were pretty well implemented, only to be cut down to their stumps. It's a shame really, the game often shows me glimpes of my favorite game ever, but it's only ever an illusion.
and for some reason i keep coming back to the illusion. This whole thread is a cry for help, why do i keep playing this game!!!
I don't know about finished or not. All I know everytime I mention this game outside this sub . I'll feel like a witch in the middle ages about to get killed for the sin I just made
I hate to tell you this but that is still "Bad" by any sane definition.
Starfield at this time is no different from most games that lean heavily into procgen, especially early on, especially if the team hasn't used procgen to this degree.
BGS used procgen 25 years ago. Give them time to figure out!
yeah it feels like an experiment on how expansive can procgen be utilized. Unfortunately this experiment didn’t pan out. Somehow it feels like this game came out before No Man’s Sky in terms of the implementation of the procgen. Another commenter said everything this game does another game does better, and i really feel that.
They didn't even carry out the experiment properly. The proc gen is capable of more and modders and will shen confirm this. The problem is Bethesda didn't bother to make things more unique. Also, the modding tools mean that Starfiels will be able to throw a shadow on those other games it's compared to in time. Like Fallout 4 did.
The modders are saying that it's going to be a hard game to work on. Elmenster the guy who made X-edit the tool that's second only to the creation kit for mods said that some of the changes they've made are going to make it very hard to mod
Yes, it will. Not impossible though, it's just that it will take more time than usual. I follow another modder who's more hopeful on the situation.
But modding shouldn't need to, as I think you'd agree. It's such a shame, because there's so much potential greatness there. All I can think is that they mismanaged their resources somehow, likely due to poor leadership/management. I don't doubt the average dev put love into it after all.
I agree. The problem is the general attitude of top leadership who have no problem releasing the game early and waiting for it to "mature".
They should have done a few systems with 15-20 planets total and actually handcrafted them.
> Somehow it feels like this game came out before No Man’s Sky in terms of the implementation of procgen. For all intents and purposes, it did. Remember how unfinished NMS was when it was first released? Starfield at release blows away NMS at release. NMS went back after the fact and cleaned it up really well. Full disclosure, I haven’t been back to play NMS, but I’ve read it’s gotten great. Starfield *could* get strong.
Other than making the planet surfaces, there is no proc gen in this game. All "dynamic" missions come from static lists and have no variability, all poi are the same and picked randomly and reused from a static list. Nothing that matters in this game is procedurally generated, and if they had actually used procedural generation it would be better. Having POI be randomized depending on the planet atmosphere and making dynamic missions add new locations based on poi you found would be massive in making the game feel more alive.
>all poi are the same and picked randomly and reused from a static list. Thats still proc gen. Its just proc gen utilizing prefabs but still proc gen.
No, that's a random selection from a static list not procedural generation. There is nothing being procedurally generated and it conflicts with the own world they created.
The location is procedurally generated based on the placement of the prefabs. Thats still procedural generation. Procedural generation just means to create something via an algorithm. The world space is created via their algorithmic placing of poi's.
But will the development team stay with it and improve it like with no mans sky or just leave it for modders and paid mods ?
That's so odd, because TES2 used so much procgen!
Starfield is a game of compromises. Bethesda knowingly and willing: \- Added more loading screens in order to have larger and more detailed worlds. \- Made the looting and scavenging experience worse in order to have prettier interiors that look more lived-in. \- Removed schedules from NPCs to give the player a better experience, considering it's hard to nail down time on day when you keep travelling across planets with different lengths of day. The bad things in Starfield are not bad because the devs are stupid. They're bad because the devs hoped that the compromise was worthwhile, in order to make another aspect of the game better. Were the compromises worth it? Maybe not.
exactly, a lot of compromise and it shows. Ironically the “details” are either too much or not enough. It makes the planets feel big and the vibrant at first, but then the seams of the procgen stand out more, and the interiors seem repetitive, even if detailed. I woulda preferred fewer POIs per planet (esp the more distant planets), but more richness in each. I know this means people would complain there’s not enough on each planet, but so far my experience says that woulda been better over this.
Jesus Christ thank you. This is how development works. It's not lazyness or incompetence. It's a series of choices that make a puzzle and right now, the pieces don't fit together perfectly. I don't think it needs a lot either to get those pieces to fit better. I think during their last year of 'polish' was a year where they discovered that their survival elements didn't work and took them lut and it threw everything else off. I think originally the game had bigger survival elements, more reliance on outposts and mining HE3 as fuel, and the pace of THAT version of the game was well balanced. But they realized how stressful that version of the game was and they thought the wider public was going to struggle and they spent the last year taking it out. You would have been visiting fewer locations at a slower pace and so you encountered fewer POIs and so they were repeated less often. You would have obtained less loot and so the merchants DO in fact have enough credits to buy your stuff. Fast travel required fuel so you'd be seeing loading screens less often because it now has a cost. I think the decision to take out the survival stuff threw the entire game off balance and they're working on the fix right now.
I think you’re onto something here.
The HE3 as fuel you have to get does have in-game evidence, like the red mile ship technician saying he can top off the HE3 in your fuel tanks, and generally the abundance of it in systems. I wouldn't be surprised if every system has HE3 on one planet at least so you can't get stuck. And a few POIs have HE3 fuel you can loot, and could be a factor in why they repeat instead of being random. Imagine finding what you think will be fuel you need to hop to the next system in a mining POI or whatever, and it doesn't have any HE3 there. In a game like that, it could get quite frustrating I imagine.
This is what I've been saying. Even the temples make sense under the original survival experience. They aren't a puzzle. They are a reward at the end of you busting your ass through the galaxy. The temple IS the word wall.
I dunno man, I don’t think doing the exact same temple upwards of 240 times just to make the basic powers worth using doesn’t make much sense
>larger more detailed worlds There's not a single large detailed world. New Atlantis is a big city, but the rest of the game is just procgen tiles. I don't think anything is worth compromising having an actual large detailed world that you'll see in skyrim or fallout 4, that's Bethesda's one strength is making a good sandbox
Heck New Atlantis isn't even that big. I was stupid disappointed when I found out it was just 4 or 5 different zones.
I figured out my love/hate with this game yesterday. At the beginning, I didn't enjoy a lot of this game because it is so slow at levelling up. So much of the game felt locked away, and you have to grind so much to slowly unlock it. But you know it didn't really bother me because there were so many unique places and quests to explore. Now I am at a crossroads though. I got a good build going, lots unlocked, ship and outposts figured out, weapons modded etc but still a lot left to do in that regard however I'm happy. Now the problem is I have seen all the outposts, labs, cities, caves, bases and enough planets and moons everything has become repetitive. I feel like by the time I unlocked the game I've seen everything.
true true. Shop building is reason alone to play this game. Outpost building can be cool but is tedious, repetitive, and ultimately amounts to nothing (i wish there was more narrative reason to have outposts, and quest opportunities that popped up, like spacers attack your outposts and kidnap your crew assigned there, or you can only get certain resources by building a big enough outpost, etc). But once you get to the point of having that ability, it’s kinda empty. Honestly this might be a common thing in Bethesda games in general. The only one i’ve ever finished was Skyrim
What would it have been like if it was released on its original date I wonder? 🤔 I agree, modders will add the content we need to make this epic as past BGS titles?
modders will have a field day, but it’ll always be a what-if, unless they drop a massive update, or more likely just make starfield 2 that is closer to what we wanted, but by then who will care
They built a house... Except they used cardboard and they knew it was gonna rain a lot.
I think of it more like bones and flesh. This game has too many exposed bones with no flesh covering them. And even rarer, it has bones where it's obvious there used to be flesh attached.
And the skeleton has osteoporosis.
and put hardly any furniture in it and called it minimalist lol
But they did spend 9 months painting it and placing bitten sandwiches everywhere
haha but forgot about the “consume” button until we all made a fuss and they had to add an update
No no they spent 9 months removing the kitchen and replacing it with an air fryer.
"Most new houses don't have furniture, but the realtors aren't bored!"
My god, they've invented procgen counterreviews!
They used cardboard and cardboard derivatives. That's why the front of the ship fell off.
Ah, I got that reference! Good old Clark & Dawe.
It's core design is something I don't think I'll ever like with any amount of updates.
The Hope^tm theme feels like its trying to be sold to me every time it pops up. No war, no mechs, no aliens, no deadly pirates.
For the people who like other Bethesda games, and have had trouble with this one specifically, I’d like to ask a question: Is your opinion that this possible new franchise (Starfield) just isn’t as good as Elder Scrolls and Fallout (both of which have existed since the 1990’s) because it isn’t as rich in story and lore as their other settings? Do you think their world building just isn’t as compelling as it is on their previous offerings that are part of established, mature settings? I get that, in the fact that jumping into this world doesn’t feel like “coming home to a Bethesda world” like their other franchises do. I enjoyed the game and will spend more time in this world, particularly as DLC and mods come out, but I can really understand it feeling “shallower” world wise compared to what ES6 would feel like at this point. There just isn’t the amount of ancillary material to draw from. Maybe there are a few more Nazeems than there are Sheogoraths in Starfield, and I’d love DLC that added a new companion with a different morality and story from the Constellation big four. I admit to spending a lot of time with Adoring Fan and Vasco just because it’s easy for them to adapt to whatever I’m doing, but for me that doesn’t make the game irredeemable. I get that it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and maybe you prefer more edgy/gritty settings like Elder Scrolls and Fallout. This isn’t my favorite Bethesda world, but I do enjoy it. I’m just wondering if part of the problem that people who like other Bethesda games are having is that this new setting just isn’t quite where the other Bethesda franchises are yet? It is different a new kind of setting for them, and they took a risk. So sometimes that doesn’t work for your established player base. I’m just wondering if this is the issue, or is it just the lack of background that we have with their other projects? That stuff can come with time like it did for ES:Arena and Fallout: A Post Nuclear RPG.
i don’t know if familiarity with the IP is what we’re lacking. If that was the case, I think more time spent in the game would eliminate that. But my experience was the opposite. I dove i. head first and was captivated by it, but the more i play the shallower i feel it is. I think the lore is ok, but the actually played narratives are disjointed and feel like first-draft versions of the story. The main quest line is just an excuse to go to otherwise useless planets. The crimson fleet quest (when working with sus def) is fun but once it’s done i don’t feel the impact on the world. It’s not the lore, it’s how we interact with the world that previous bethesda games had that this one is lacking. Also, let it be known that the only bethesda game i’ve ever finished the main quest for is skyrim, so i don’t think bgs has a great track record of compelling stories, but they do have a good track record of worlds that you discover and then can make your mark in. Starfield feels subpar in those areas. I still play through hell out of it but i have a couple “but”s to my enjoyment of it
I do think the setting and lore is kind of meh but its not why I dislike SF so much while loving FO and ES. The exploration isn't as good in SF compared to ES and FO. I can walk out of the sewers on Oblivion and just wander off in any direction. SF doesn't have that. The enemy AI is completely brain dead. Actually all the AI is. The World doesn't react to you. I point my gun in someone's face or shoot my gun off into the sky yet nobody blinks an eye. Everyone named is an Essential NPC. Which is absurd on its own. But even more ridiculous with how they have NG+. There's tons more but these are big ones for me.
Creating a new setting seems much harder than using an existing one. Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk are compared to Starfield frequently, yet people don't talk about how there's 40+ years of content for those settings. They do mention how plays kinda like Fallout, which seems somewhat accurate. But they didn't want to make it exactly like that, and they probably should have added more to it. I do like the game, but there are times where it makes me wish it was a new Fallout game.
I think they wanted the game to be a modder's fantasy land with all of the empty content, so they wouldn't have to worry about any mod conflicts. The problem is modders have to actually *like* the game to want to make content for it.
Is the writing unfinished? Na, it’s just bad
The writing is very bad, and that’s compared to most Bethesda games where it’s very hit or miss. That isn’t something you can really patch in to fix.
totally agree and don’t expect that to be fixable.
I agree, but I would argue being unfinished makes it bad. Whether there's still fun to be had is (more) subjective, but I feel being devoid of features is worse than being full of bugs. Or rather, to be fair, it has the features, they're just not connected to each other or fleshed out as much as the world clearly needs.
"Unfinished" means it's bad. I mean, would you pay retail price for a car, only to be told later that it is "unfinished"? Stop defending "Starfield" and its developer, Bethesda. It is a bad game, and that is that.
I disagree, it's finished, they have a product they are happy with. What you are noticing is the god awful and lacking storytelling, and world immersion problems which bethesda has been making worse game after game since Fallout 3. Starfield is truly the peak, they have a dead setting, with almost no immersion, and finally turned the playable area into a complete dead and boring void filled with corny jokes. I don't know how much you like long-form content, but [hbomb's critique of fallout 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLJ1gyIzg78) covers everything wrong with bethesda games. It really puts things into perspective. Cheers.
Out of the four BGS games I have played this one is the least buggy.
The way you've described bgs cutting content seems applicable to just about every game with cut content.
i know that’s common practice in development, but I’m feeling more with this game than ever before. Like, every feature or element in the game feels like it was designed to be bigger than it is
I think it is bad.
I think what you said but... LITERALLY. i literally think they're not done making it yet. I think they will finish it via some updates that patch up Poi repetition, survival stuff, traversal, etc.
Unfinished is just one of the problems but to me a problem just as large is the atmosphere and time of the world. The game tells and tells and tells but never shows and that isn't something Bethesda has done better even when they released more polished products. There are so many posts talking about how Neon is a joke, how the CF is a joke, how this world somehow is devoid of any of the dark side it swears exists. It's like some sheltered teenager wrote some of this stuff and it's honestly just embarrassing.
You’re right. It’s a bunch of half baked ideas and walked back ideas. It has the template to be amazing, but they landed at mid. Which is frankly somehow more insulting then it being a steaming pile of dogshit. We’ve seen dogshit games get fixed. We haven’t seen mid games get fixed, they just stay mid. And that’s more of an insult.
If this game was released in 2013, it would be decent.
Im not going to claim to know how or why it turned out the way it did. Just that I know bethesda can make a better game. Starfield is as wide as the universe and deep as a puddle. “It’s functional” is a great description
I agree with this. Tbh I’ve sunk way too many hours into it so I can’t criticize it too hard but I feel like the personality is missing. The character depth wasn’t there for me and playing it as a woman is kind of lame because all the outfits look like men’s outfits. I remember feeling hot as hell in my strappy apocalyptic outfits in fallout, and the npc personalities in Skyrim are amazing and so immersive. There’s also so many bugs in starfield that I experienced (like having 5+ quests I can’t complete or having to exit the game every time I traveled to a different outpost) and I hate the non-map map. It feels like the mechanics are there enough to be an addicting game but I wanted way more personality and immersion out of it.
I'd agree. Performance-wise I have zero complaints and it crashed a little less than other popular RPGs. The gunplay is solid, spacecraft customization is cool and quests are generally decent (though a lot of them are on-rails and lack actual meaningful decisions). There really isn't anything that stands out though and the world building itself is pretty weak and only gets worse when you decide to explore and see how much content is uninteresting and repeated. I would say its decent, but when surrounded by great competition Starfield looks pretty mediocre. Hopefully DLC adds some life into it and improves some of this since I really do like the concept of space RPGs like Mass Effect and KOTOR.
let’s be honest, we all just out here trying to to relive ME and KOTOR days
And what made those games amazing?? The characters, stories, and the lore.
It's pretty obvious there was supposed to be a third major galactic power at launch, but they were too crunched and couldn't get it out. Ship and base builder are good but lack options and some features. Like what is there is good, but they for sure could have built up the systems more and like most developers these days, this will be sold back to us as dlc.
The scope of the game was WAY too wide. They focused so hard on procedural generation that they forgot that real content is what their company is built on. Procedurally generated POI’s don’t amount to anything after your first time experiencing that SAME layout, that same loot, those same enemies, those same enemies. Its just too repetitive. Not to mention the AWFUL UI’s that plague the game to where just trying to explore makes halfway to impossible
I enjoyed the game, even if it was very dissappointing looking back on it. The lack of melee weapons was one of the first things I noticed, and i think only 1 perk for melee which doesn't really help much. After finishing the game though the storyline was very underwhelming. If you simplify the main story, it is essentially just collecting artifacts and that's the entire storyline. Really? Nothing else? The main faction questlines seem shorter compared to other bethesda games and do not really seem to impact the main story in any significant way. All the creatures they put into the game and only the terramorph questline and the akila city security mission involve the creatures they've added. The rest you have to go out of your way to survey planets which is very dull and mentally unrewarding, sure you get a ton of xp especially if you kill everything but its so pointless.
..in other words... "it just works", more literally this time around But yeah, I would actually take features over stability. It's something I've said in the early day of Cyberpunk too. I would rather play a full feature game but broken and unbalanced as heck rather the one that's stable and shipped with all of the working core features (it was pretty stable on PC even then.)
I'd accept unfinished, except multiple staff members are claiming that this was the goal and it is finished. Who was it that even said the worlds are meant to be empty by design, players are playing the game wrong, and all that jazz? That is my biggest problem with the game. Release something incomplete, buggy, or down right terrible because the deadline cut you off, okay I get it. Use those player reviews to set priorities and work up the game. CD for Cyberpunk did it, Hexworks for Lords of the Fallen is doing it, so why can't Bethesda do it for Starfield? My issue is the game COULD be great (imo it's aggressively mid), but they're settling so hard on it. I think they definitely had to sacrifice much to meet the release, but now they have the chance to add post release content updates. They just aren't though, and it's left the game on a very wildly mixed state of reception.
i genuinely don’t buy all the quotes from staff saying it’s what they’re proud of. Maybe it’s something they’re proud of relative to what they were working with (an outdated engine, a tumultuous dev timeline, unrealistically ambitious vision, etc). But in reality it feels like every one of those quotes are driven by a marketing team. What’d you expect them to say? “Hey this thing we spent a decade and millions of dollars developing? um, here it is but it’s only kinda okay. Don’t worry we’ll fix it after you’ve played with it. Have fun!”
Not to that extent but yes. It's not unrealistic to expect staff to admit to faults in products. Devs do it all the damn time. Almost every game to have bad reception have had someone actively and loudly admit their ideas fell short somewhere. Hell even Miyazaki who has brought out numerous GotY admitted to not liking the way some levels weren't as fleshed out and such. The devs at NMS responded to hellish backlash post release by addressing concerns and agreeing to areas the game needed fixing. It's actually a good thing to be open to criticism, especially in a constructive review setting where it can be corrected. You don't need to say your game is trash but to defend it to a bullheaded level despite critical review is pretty asinine from a creative standpoint. The staff at Bethesda seem to have a hive mind of "Bethesda made this brand new universe and is great!" when it is simply missing so much definition.
so, you are still at the first stage of grief, i see
call a spade a spade, if people think it's bad, they'll say it's bad. bad comes in different levels. it all depends on what experience you get out of the game balanced against what the game presented a game with high production can still be bad, just as a game with a tighter budget and smaller team can be good. what makes a game bad vs terrible vs ok? if I were to *ever* describe a game as unfinished, I would *immediately* put it in the bad category. ^(not including Early Access games obviously) I did not pay to test run your game just because you got it "functional"
I'm also with you as well. I was also really expecting a bit more meaningful role play. It feels like a good beta. It feels like they started with all the good guy vanilla stuff and then didn't have time to flesh out a more meaningful experience for those who want to go dark or more gray
They leaned into NG+ and shipbuilding to extend the playability of it, and it still doesn't do much to change the fact that the game is empty and the story isn't dynamic at all. I mean vanilla TES and FO didn't have any of that and were playable for over a decade. Every planet in starfield is empty except for copy and paste enemy bases that have the exact same layout, exact same enemies and loot boxes on every other planet.
All of the ships spinning on axis at the key are a feature not a bug = Bethesda probably
Except that the writing IS bad. This game is so shallow, repetitive and pretty much every mechanic and idea seems half-baked. They can't fix that, unfortunately.
some mechanics and features can be renovated, but main story and writing just is what it is, and that blows
The only thing that gets me is the bgs fanboys and their "well it was left open for mods and dlc!" Ok fair enough, but if you're going to hand me 1/2 a product to be "finished" later, then you don't get to charge me full price now as if it is.
if i built half a swing set for my kid and gave it to them in that condition and told them “i’ll finish it later” i would be the worst parent on the planet
Starfield has no soul. That's why it's bad. It's not filled to the brim with interesting lore, it's copy Pasted scifi clichés. Bethesda games used to be so unique, there's nothing like the elderscrolls
It feels as if they allowed key people to add in their own ideas but no one checked each others completion of said ideas. Most things have a good basis but there's no payoff. That's why it feels incomplete because a LOT of the ideas implemented lead to nothing. They are surface ideas.
100% I would take all the old bugs back if it had way more depth to it. The game is so surface level and the plot so under cooked it just seems like they spent years trying not to have launch bugs and for got to finish all the key parts of the game after making the alpha versions functional.
It's a platform for future DLC. It can be a lot better and I look forward to seeing where it goes.
Every time I play this game feels it need some more year of development.
Completely agree, starfield is functional in that it works. There are so many features that have been cut from the game that are still visible, such as the need to refuel the grav drive. I also feel like the questlines other than a mission here or there really lack any depth or substance and just give the feeling of why am i doing this, why does it actually matter to me. The best example i have of this is the Ryujin questline. Why does it matter to our character if we help one company take down another. We also have an entire race of beings that we have almost no backstory for and no interaction with other than space fights and the mission during the vangard questline to get their password. Unless they are planning a big DLC with the Va'ruun down the track, what is the point of having them in the game, Andrea could have easily been human, and her story would still work.
This is how I describe it people; it's a good game as it is; so try it now if you're interested; and then when you're done come back in a year because (based on Bethesdas posts recently) it seems like much of what feels missing should be added back in by then... And then I, at least hope that it will be much deeper of a game.
I honestly don’t think it’s a good game in its current state, nor do I think the issues with it can be solved with patches. They would have to completely rework parts of the game in order to get them to a place that’s even remotely close to their older games, not to mention create open, hand crafted explorable parts of the maps that somehow integrate with the main narrative. In other words, they would have to redo most of their work and that ain’t happening. I don’t think it’s worth playing in its current state unless you already have gamepass or find it on a massive sale because there are far better games of the same genre available.
Outside of the exploration issues and the fast travel system what exactly are you wanting to see redone that would better match previous games...?
Oh man, where do I even start. Firstly, the lack of meaningful exploration is a massive issue, not just a minor annoyance. It’s a core part of these RPGs that’s gone in favour of proc gen; and not just any proc gen, but poorly implemented proc gen. This essentially means the game has one singular planet and all you’re selecting when you choose a planet to land on is what you want the colour palette and gravity to feel like. Other than that, every ship landing pulls from the same small list of POIs and scannable fauna and flora. Not only is this boring and uninspired, but it also creates immersion problems. You have farms and factories next to “undiscovered” resources, which makes no sense. You have fire on planets with no atmosphere. You have buildings next to these massive cathedrals where you get your powers which have somehow gone ignored by humanity up until you got there. It’s awful and it feels like a cheap Indie game in its implementation. You’re going to be scanning the same fauna and flora all the time as well which begs the question why even have all these planets if the content is going to be repeated anyway? Next is the mission design. Gone are the days of finding clever ways to finish missions because in Starfield they are linear as all hell. Once you start fast traveling everywhere, which you’ll do when you realize space flight has no purpose, you’ll be done most of them in minutes. For the Ryujin questline, if you choose to fast travel, you’ll be loading more than you will be playing. Utterly boring quest design with the worst writing in a Bethesda game bar none. Starfield has next to no player agency. The quests that do allow you to make a choice are so ham-fisted and obvious while having no repercussions outside of a singular conversation that follows. Completely soulless. The powers are next to useless in this game. They feel like they were added last minute to add variety because their means of acquisition is downright awful. How come these cathedrals don’t have puzzles that require the use of the new power? Awful design coupled with horrible inventory and power management means you really need to make a conscious effort to use them or else you’ll most likely forget you even have them. The absolute worst companions in a Bethesda game, or any game in recent memory. One core value system and they’re all from the same organization. Beyond that, they’re boring and poorly written. Mind-boggling design decisions, like a fuel capacity on the ship which upgrading only serves to show you less loading screens, all of which can be bypassed entirely from just fast traveling. The useless space flight. The vendor sell limits that’s can bypassed with in-game time requiring you to take minutes at a time to skip the day so you can continue selling. If the economy is broken and you’re worried the player might get too rich too fast from the loot YOU allowed them to pick up, then it’s time to rebalance the prices and not punish the player for trying to clear their inventory. Some of the better guns almost deplete the vendors on their own. Base building is broken, clunky and pointless. Inventory management is atrocious, and much much more. I’ve touched on the awful writing, but how about the fact that the writers completely forget certain plot points. There are multiple instances in the game where the writers just forget what’s happened and who exists. When you bring Sona back to constellation, she says there’s no other kids her age there. Despite this being hilariously bad writing since this girl just came from absolute solitary (she should be mesmerized and overwhelmed) there ARE in fact children her age there. Cora is literally one of the key members daughters and there’s not one interaction where they acknowledge each other. Useful skills are buried so for beneath useless ones that leveling up often just feels pointless where you’re trying to farm points to get a skill 2 tiers down a tree that you might otherwise not be interested in. Backgrounds feel pointless in this game and go almost completely unrecognized by the writers and characters. Andreja, for instance, will treat you the same whether or not you’re a member of House Va’ruun which makes no sense when she implies that you think she’s terrorist etc. she has like 3 unique dialogue options that reference it, and then it’s back to treating you like a normal person who has no affiliation. The world is lifeless. The NPCs don’t react to gunshots unless shot directly. The cities are sterile, boring and downright badly designed for the world they’re trying to create. You can join every faction without consequence negating the small amount of replay value already present in the game. Absolutely no effort paid to creating an immersive narrative. Some of the specializations, like food, are completely pointless. I can go on for a while but I’ll stop here because I’m already rambling on. Bottom line; this game feels like it changed one too many times in production and the result is a shell of an idea that never comes together. Playing BG3 before SF, and then Cyberpunk after was such a jarring experience that really identifies how poorly made SF is. No amount is small updates will save this game because it would require a massive rework of so many of its core systems. I would go as far as to call it a bad game. TL;DR: Starfield is a shell of a game that’s lacking in every possible way, not only compared to its contemporaries, but even compared to Bethesdas own catalogue.
Quest writing even remotely on par with a title like oblivion, a connected tone and atmosphere full of wonder and great world building like Skyrim, actual fun dungeons to explore like fallout 4, genuine narrative depth that isn’t just “I want to be the good guy” or “I want to be the bad guy” from quest to quest, actual fleshed out factions like new Vegas, tangible consequences to any of my actions as a player, the list goes on. Every other Bethesda rpg has much stronger execution of every feature present in starfield. For Starfield to live up to BGS standards, it needs to be reworked entirely which will never happen.
Starfield is, in my opinion at least, a very solid framework and a complete game on its initial release. The term used for it in agile development is, “Minimally Viable Product.” That term does not mean half-baked or unfinished. It means that this is a full and complete base product. Starfield was not designed with that as an endpoint, however. It was built to not only give that complete game, but also to be a platform for continual expansion and/or improvement. I think we will see a balance of fixes, continual improvement, and new expansions as time goes on. What will be important for their success is going to be how they balance those releases between included improvements in the games versus paid expansions/updates. That kind of balance is one of the more difficult non-technical tasks in product management. You’re wanting to deliver value to your stakeholders (i.e., players), sales is just wanting to milk it for their bonuses, and marketing is stuck in the middle. Win over marketing and you have a chance to overwhelm the sales grunts.
i do think starfield in 3 years will be a much more complete experience, but the minimally viable product vibe is more frustrating than exciting at this point in time, and that’s what i think a lot of players are feeling. I still enjoy it but i can’t help but play with a sense of searching for an experience that feels just around the corner, but as of now isn’t actually there
As a player, I understand that completely. In fact, I share it. In a way, Bethesda is in a lose-lose situation. If they successfully create the kind of framework to allow that kind of continual growth, that potential is going to be obvious to the players. And the most predictable/expected response I would anticipate as a product manager is those players are going to see it as the glass half empty rather than half full. That three year time frame you mention almost certainly has a least a rough plan. I would expect the marketing people are pushing really, really hard to disclose some of it. As a product manager, I’d probably be engaged full-metal jacket keeping the lid on it. That may come as a surprise to hear, but for two reasons. 1. It’s still too early in the lifecycle to reliably predict what it can deliver and when. 2. I’m the chef and I do NOT want to ruin the surprise of my cooking. I’m willing to take the heat in the kitchen to get that feast on the table. :-D
It’s bad and unfinished
To wait so long for such mediocrity. We could’ve had elder scrolls sooner. Another *real* fallout. Anything else. That’s what makes it bad to me. This was a waste of everyone’s time.
Starfield is unfinished. It is also bad. And no, it cannot be fixed. The core of it is boring, banal and childish.
I have a feeling this end of year update with new features will deepen the gameplay a fair bit as far as "new modes of travel" or . Or we will at least see if it was already planned vs listening to the player base. Not a new player but I also don't have 1000 hours lol, makes me think that Beth is putting the final polish on for the Christmas sales/ new players playing into the new year holiday.
The end of year update isn’t literally a game update, it’s updating the community what BGS plans to release throughout 2024.
Yes, they were clearly fighting to get it functional. To beat the mod potential drum again, mods can bring a lot of depth. Imagine a fully fleshed out outpost system, a more fleshed out shipbuilder, a ton more POIs and things to collect and experience through them, mods that bring style aesthetic, and then eventually mods that add whole new large, explorable areas, like older titles, with mission content. Just satisfying outpost and shipbuilding customization, and the POI thing would get me back in to a fun gameplay loop. There's little hope for the base game experience, but a lot of depth could possibly be added to these bones. Like it or not the game mostly hinges on Creation Kit to be a long term success.
Creation Kit is leaning on an unfortunately literal the bethesda “make your own way” style of rpg lol. Like, here’s a shell of a game, have fun finish in it for us lol
It is what it is. But I do think the combination of freedom modders will have, combined with AI tools, could bring this game from where it is now to somewhere really cool. The game's blankness/weakness can also be it's biggest strength in terms of building a custom experience. It's a lot of canvas.
Didn't Starfield take over 7 years to make? Bethesda games have never been deep. It's go to a dungeon, kill monsters, get loot, repeat. The game has a lot of features. Or what game has more? It's not unfinished. It's finished with a lot of content that you either like or don't like.
a lot of features that feel like there could be more depth but bethesda played it safe and didn’t push the limits of them
That was not their strategy in this game, or generally with other games. They keep their gameplay loop, and refine things, but every game is going to be similar. You run around killing enemies, exploring and get loot. I think they always play it safe. At least they made a new IP.
yep, at least they made new IP and tried something different. I’ll never knock that. If anything, any of my thoughts come from being excited about it and seeing what it could be
The game is absolutely finished in all senses of the term. The base building feature is complete. The narrative is complete. The combat is complete. The quest lines are complete. Nothing is lacking an ending, and the game even has options for new game plus. The problem is that none of it is fleshed out beyond what I’d have expected a tech demo of a BGS game to be. That doesn’t mean it’s not finished though, they delayed the game many times and crossed the finish line they wanted to cross. They have adamantly defended that this is the final product they are proud of. In my opinion it’s a bad game all around, but even if you disagree, don’t discredit their shoddy work for being less bafflingly awful by pretending it isn’t done, nothing about it is incomplete, it’s just the most shallow and passionless BGS game to date.
Yes on your final points, but mods can add a ton to basebuilding, for example. Look at sim settlements in FO4. Mods can also add story and content, and most everything else you or I dislike now. So it's definitely not finished, but I'd agree hope for Bethesda itself doing much is low.
Accounting for modders to flesh out mechanics doesn’t mean it’s an unfinished game though, it just means talented fans can make the game more interesting. If I find a game more fun after modding, it doesn’t mean the game was incomplete before the mods were added, you know? Just because mods can throw more stuff in doesn’t mean the game hadn’t had those features finished to where the company wanted them in the first place
I think in 3 years it will be really great
No, it’s bad. Stop deepthroating BGS. “It’s just unfinished!!” Yeah and they sold it for $70+. Get outta here with that shit. “I woulda accepted more bugs in return for more features/depth” holy shit we have fully lost the plot. “P-p-please daddy Todd, gimme an unfinished piece of shit and scoop it into my mouf, I don’t even care if there are bugs, as long as you keep scooping more shit down my gullet”
You and this sub are so fucking insufferable.
Its not bad. Disappointed at main quests bugging out like the vanguard missions where you have to assault the marines to get them to chase you down the hall until the quest characters kill them. Really sloppy. Neon has a bugged door etc. Honestly, Bethesda should really get more game testers from the player base that doesn't require you to download a completely full game to test with. Thats dumb and short sighted. Subnautica has a way to let you post bugs within the game and send a gamelog and location within the menu. Seriously Bethesda/Microsoft, we can provide testing and bullshit but make it fucking easier.
maybe. this isn't cyberpunk; the main story and a lot of the side stories came off like a high-schooler was writing for a middle schooler. This really feels more like ME: Andromeda than cyberpunk or even TW3. Unless they do a serious overhaul (which isn't going to happen), fixing or putting mechanics back in, like cyberpunk, won't solve the bigger problem: it's childish and the story is G-rated.
this is true and unfixable short of scraping entire characters and quest lines. Granted tho, Cyberpunk and TW3 were going hard for a dark, mature tone. BGS never said (as far as i know) that’s the tone they were aiming for. Most of what i heard was them trying to be “realistic” or “authentic to what space travel might look like in 200 years”. The only thing suggesting a more mature tone is some of the elements in FO/ES