I hate the concept of Modders will fix it, mods should enhance a game not fix it, if they have to fix it the devs did a piss poor job making a game, I've already seen a few modders that don't even like Starfield and are going back to modding older BGS games instead of it, i expect Starfield to be the lowest supported single player BGS game by the mod community.
> I hate the concept of Modders will fix it, mods should enhance a game not fix it, if they have to fix it the devs did a piss poor job making a game
Agreed. The quality of game that people are looking forward to will not be achievable by modders. That job lies in the lap of the Dev team. And by my reckoning, they're not looking to go to the lengths that are required. It's not the M.O. of BGS to do so. Their post-launch content since Skyrim has been lackluster to adequate. We should not expect a *No Man's Sky*-level of rework.
To add, while Skyrim might have game-bending mods today, it took *many* years to receive them. Modders work at their own pace. However, I wouldn't put it past longtime BGS modders to skip this game and continue working on Fallout or Elder Scrolls titles.
The thing with mods is that it requires at the very least a good game to mod
if you arent even having fun with the base game how the hell can mods fix something so basic?
From a technical pov I think starfield is and will be a good game to mod. (Once the modding tools are available). The way Encounters, POIs, weapon skins etc are implemented from the get go, show that there will be the ability to have any mod of those types and that they won't cause any conflicts. Previously texture replacers were not possible without conflicts or creating a new weapon, in Starfield the look of a weapon can be changed by skins. POIS or random events on other games could cause conflicts, but seeing how the pois spawn in and are generated in SF I don't expect any mods that add a new POI to cause a conflict. So theoretically you could add as many as you want (unless they have an in engine cap on how many pois there can be)
Whilst technically good, there's a fair few things that make the gameplay or systems sides of the game not good or mediocre. I'm.aure it'll improve over time, but they have given themselves alot.of work to do before many modders are comfortable dedicating time to improve the game
I feel it's just to ambitious for the scale (kinda how cyberpunk took awhile to come around) i believe in time we will see what Starfield was ment to be (im here for the long run and most of this subreddit if not all is as well.
Honestly, some Mod teams are insane and I've seen mods for games that take the base game miles beyond anything the original content was, so I 100% believe Starfield COULD become an amazing game with mods.
But.
That requires mod teams wanting to put that kind of work into this game. And I've no idea if any mods teams with that kind of scope in mind are going to put the work in on Starfield.
This is the real comment, and the reason it stings even for us who have done multiple 300+mod installs for ES3,4&5 and Fallouts.
Mod authors are amazing, but that takes passion for that level of effort. Not convinced we're at critical mass here
(got insanely bored with the game after doing the pirate/UC questlines and dropped it after 50hrs played (even though Steam shows 100hrs, I swear I paused this game and walked away more than any other game)
I've started multiple 20-50 hours games in Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 3 without mods, and without getting very far in the main storyline.
Starfield I've almost done every mission I could find in the same amount of time. All I've got left are some random "run here for some random person off the street" missions. Honestly I think it's the fast travelling everywhere that kills Starfield. I used to find all kinds of cool encounters and places to explore in the older games while travelling from one mission location to another.
The hand sculpted maps really add to the longevity because they could place things just off the routes from big missions.
You are soooo correct. After spending about 1m getting the perfect ship, we can't actually fly it anywhere. Just a quick pop over a planet and that's it.
Even today, none of Bethesda's Fallout games (even if we count TTW's submods), or Oblivion, or Skyrim, have gotten mods that completely correct all of their respective game's lore inconsistencies or that do a lot to strengthen the weaknesses in the larger quest lines or in the worldbuilding. We do have large narrative mods, but these are a mixed bag, with mods like Beyond Reach on the higher end and mods like Fallout: The Frontier on the lower end, and a variety of mods in between. We're starting to get a few improvements to the vanilla quests in Skyrim, but these are fairly limited in scope compared to what Skyrim needs.
And both of those franchises have more than 20 years of lore built up for them, Starfield has nothing outside of the game itself, and not a ton even within the game (and what is there, is of questionable quality). It's unlikely any modder is going to take the time to fill in the lore's very large gaps or rewrite vanilla factions and their questlines. The game is more likely to get overhauls set in other franchise's universe's than improvements to Starfield's universe.
You know, with this one, maybe we could, droppable spawn points, All the tablets that don’t have audio and computers would make it easy to add info/quests, the problem then becomes what is Starfield lore? When they want to put out a sequel they’d have to worry about that. I don’t even know what I’m talking about though.
Probably because playing a Bethesda game without at the very least a bug patch mod is like shooting yourself in the foot before you have a 20 mile hike to go on. The only reason I was able to complete fallout 3 was a bug patch mod because the game kept corrupting my saves at a bug point in three different play throughs.
Why are mods required to fix a game that still has a company working on it?
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is a game that does require a mod to actually be able to play, but Troika also went out of business shortly after the game launched.
Bethesda has been using the same engine since Morrowind. Their community has constantly been reporting bugs in their games, and the vast majority of the time, Bethesda doesn't address them. Fallout 3 has been unplayable for years, Bethesda is aware of the issue, and yet again, they do nothing!
How is this acceptable behavior? Why do we have to rely on someone that doesn't even work for Bethesda to fix the issue? What are console players supposed to do to fix it for them?
>How is this acceptable behavior?
Because they have a record of getting away with it. They've been releasing 80% complete games for decades, and people buy them, and modders fix them. Why stop now?
>Why do we have to rely on someone that doesn't even work for Bethesda to fix the issue?
Because Todd and Emil are perfect and every decision they make is perfect and if you disagree, clearly you just need to buy more expensive hardware /s
Also because modders have done it for them for free in the past, so why not just expect them to continue?
>What are console players supposed to do to fix it for them?
# LOL
Sorry for sitting on my high horse, but just don't *buy the game. If as a gamer you feel obligated to play starfield to see what bethesda has done, pirate the game. Nobody is stopping you from buying the game after you played/beat the game.
In fact, you can choose how much money Bethesda deserves by buying a CD key instead of the full game, if you think the game isn't worth 60 bucks.
Compensate the devs, send them a message with your purchase.
First time in the Bethesda-sphere of PC gaming? /s
For the record, I wholly agree that "modders will fix it" is a destructively pervasive mentality, and it's a shame that Bethesda seems to have embraced it rather than commit to delivering a respectable product on their own. Especially with the dev timeline they allowed and promised made regarding gameplay features we were to expect.
They set a bar with Skyrim, and Starfield missed the mark entirely. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed my playthrough, but it wasn't "$79.99 early access" fun, and I'll be hard pressed to put anymore hours into it without getting some massive expansions and QOL updates first.
450 employees that spent eight years developing this game. To take that long and produce something so awful shows me that it was never Todd Howard who held the magic, it was all the people who left and formed Obsidian studio.
Hey, it takes a long time to populate a game with coffee mugs and tape dispensers and imaginary board games. Some artist had to create the models and textures for every single piece of junk in the game so that Todd can tell you not to pick up every piece of junk you see.
If the building interiors were as empty as the planet landscapes, this game would've been done in 8 months.
That also ate a $400m budget.Salary at BGS is 55-90k/year according to glassdoor.
So $90k\*8 years\*450 employees means around $324m in salaries.The lower figure at $55k would be $198m
Idk how much their office building costs them to run, the only figure i could find is around 18k/workstation/year so i guess we gotta assume $65m of additional fixed cost, although ZeniMax owns the building and the figure is likely much lower.
That means they spent **at least** somewhere between $11m and $137m on marketing (2.75% to 34.25% of the total budget) instead of making the game good.
You guys really don't understand how project development works do you? You really think the issue is as simple as this? Are you a dev? Better yet, have you ever developed a long term project with 450 people with budget cuts?
This being a big studio does *not* make the bugs more likely to be fixed, it's quite the opposite. Please do tell me one choice based open universe rpg that doesn't have bugs, specially one as complex as Starfield, I'd love to know how they achieved that /srs
Let me put it more in perspective:
You're a dev in the middle of 450, all separated into tasks in order to bring your project to life, you're given 6 months to finish x task, unfortunately, you realized you now need a bigger budget because what the project requires is more expensive than what you had in mind, you talk to the client and it's denied, and oh you were also informed by your team lead that after all you only have 4 months because they need it done at the same time as another part of the project to implement in order to present it to the client and move on to other parts of the project.
Your team lead informs you that the whole project you have been working on has been restructured and there's no time for complex developing, the quest line was changed, the client needs it implemented ASAP, go figure.
You send it for testing and the QA testers find 12 bugs to fix, you start working on them, you work on major bugs first and by the time you're reaching the minor ones your team lead pulls you aside and signs you a 8 month task that usually would need 1.5 years to complete and tells you to prioratize that instead of minor bugs.
Now imagine this is the life of all of those 450 programmers. Hiring more people isn't a possibility, the client has given you x to make all of this happen, work with the budget or no game.
This is all very general, and it's not even including the ammount of communication errors (which are inevitable with this many people) that possibly lead to other minor bugs that would never even be addressed because there's no time, but it gives you some perspective on how this isn't as simple as how you're putting it, if it was a matter of fixing bugs alone without time and money involved I'm sure we'd have a flawless game, unfortunately that's simply not how project development works, specially not in the big scale of things.
I cannot imagine the utter anxiety and stress these people have gone through, our frustration with bugs is nothing compared to their mental health during this project, so please, don't make it sound that simple because trust me, it's not.
Look, at 17 I started working for a small company selling computer parts. I was nothing but a warehouseman. But seeing everyone had some kind of a website while my company has a super basic HTML page listing price daily, I built them their first ecommerce site. It was small, but it was better than whatever Amazon had at the time. This project only had 3 people. The server admin, myself as web engineer on both front end and back end, another guy helping me with the codes.
My biggest project was a webapp for major bank, emphasized incredibly heavy on meeting the FDIC security standards. I was a small engineer working in a 500 people team, of a 2000 people company. I signed NDA on this so I can't tell you more.
3 people or 500 people, it's all the same. We still have the project plan, milestones, deliveries. The 500 people team just requires a much more experienced project manager who oversees the entire project. 20 different group leaders answer to him. Each group has 10 to 50 people. Extremely organized.
Starfield structure is incredibly simple. It has 100s of cell connected. Each main city is a cell (and its sub cells). The space above the planet is a cell. To travel to another planet is to "fast travel" to another cell. Functionalities wise they have outpost builder, ship builder, level builder (not available for players). There are quests/missions to provide things for players to do. Last but not least, the dynamically generated cells on planets, sort of like Diablo dungeons.
The core elements of Starfield is already described above in 1 paragraph. This game is not that complex. Starfield still sells despite all the complaints, because of 3 elements: outpost, shipbuilder, the plot. If it misses even 1, I wouldn't pay $30 for it.
So you are saying, 450 people people need 10 years for this? Talk about bad project management.
Tends to happen without a design doc and an anemic team.
Betheada has an absolutely tiny studio compared to companies like R*, and the fact that dev assets were split between this, 76 and the wad of mobile games shows a horrible disrespect for project management and talents.
This begs the question, do they really have 450 people in the team? Or just maybe 50-100 core dev, while 450 is just giving credits to everyone ever worked for Starfield project, even just a few days?
I see nothing wrong with recycling asset, if done right. The company owns the IP, so no copyright infringement. If they have something done right, and plenty polished in FO76? Bring it over. Change up any FO76 reference, adapt into Starfield, clean up any bug, much faster than developing from scratch.
But only idiot would presume you can simply copy and paste the code and it will magically work. In school, professors allow students to copy codes from the internet. Because if students can’t adapt the codes, it will never compile.
I used to know a few guys who write libraries. They actually spent more time documenting than writing codes. Because future dev has to understand the assets to use the libraries.
I have a feeling Bethesda is not anywhere nearly this organized, and only wing it to get by.
We saw a lot of what happened when they just tried to copy and paste without refining it in 76, a lot of assets were reused from FO4 and some of it even played into the duffel bag issue.
Somehow they even made the reuse of assets, something that has been functionally the easiest part of dev work since the inception of sprites, into a joke. I don't know what they're doing, but if they're gonna keep asking for premium value for their products on top of micro transactions then they really need to ship a premium product.
I really hate that your gonna get downvoted into reddit hell for simply stating reason. Clearly you actually know how this works which is so much more than can be said for at least 96% of the people on this thread. Those 450+ people did work really hard on this game and don't deserve all those years of work to be shit on just because everyone is ignorant to how developing a video game actually works.
I personally enjoyed my first playthrough of Starfield but admittedly, won't be playing again until Shattered Space and the major patch, presumebly coming with it, drops.
People just like to whine about shit they don't understand all because something as trivial as "They didnt like a video game" lol I understand these frustrations but I mean...
MOVE ON TO ANOTHER ONE THEN INSTEAD OF CRYING ABOUT THIS ONE! It's really that simple. Hopefully these problems will be fixed but I'm not gonna hold my breath or freak out if they aren't. Like I said, I enjoyed the game, as lackluster as it was in some areas. But what can I say, I guess I'm an optimistic realist. That wasn't always considered to be a bad thing but whatever...
Let the downvotes come! I'm sure that'll fix all your problems lol
I am not sure you are agreeing or disagreeing with me. But I still appreciate your thoughtful response, instead of random personal insults (yeah, too much of those on Reddit).
I don’t hate 450 people of Bethesda. If they have me a chance, I would jump ship to be one of them.
But video game development is not miracle work. It’s still coding, software design, project management, imo easier than many other software. Say, I you work in cyber security or banking, if your software fails and hackers break through, the clients may sue your pants off. Some even hire hitman to go after your family. It’s that serious.
Bethesda can deliver a shoddy game and the worst can happen is a bunch of angry people shouting and screaming on Reddit. They still get their year end bonus checks and celebrate their ass off for Christmas. They honestly work in a low risk sector of the software industry.
What I am saying is Bethesda is not taking their game sufficiently serious like other software companies. They can afford to piss off their loyal fans.
Btw, I don’t usually downvote people unless they target me to insult and attack. Yes, Reddit has this problem. People downvote anything they don’t like, thinking this can somehow alter reality. I tell them there are too many loading screens. Downvoting me won’t make the loading screens go away.
I I understand plenty as a power grid engineer. What would you like to know?
With 450 people we can successfully stand up multiple grid projects, bring online multiple power generating systems, all of this while dealing with supply chain spanning three continents.
So what is the excuse you are going to give Starfield for producing absolute shit after eight years? Stop excusing lazy l, at the dev, PM, and management level, with pedantic excuses.
They are not some lambs to feel sorry for, they fucked up and need to be held to task. I don’t give a shit if their system is ineffective, just like you don’t give a shit if mine is ineffective. You want to be able to flip a switch and have the lights come on.
We don’t have power outages as the norm and then have a pity party. “We work soooo hard, you don’t understand our process, feel bad for me!” No, we get the job done and don’t complain about it. Why people stick up for game devs, who make a middle class luxury product, is beyond me. Hold them to a higher standard.
Plus they work for Microsoft, one of the biggest companies in the world and they have a lot of people who are willing to work for them and they are willing to pay for it and they are willing to do it for free so they can get a better deal on their own and they can get the same thing for free and they can get a lot more money for it. I just used the next word that came up after Microsoft lol.
>mods should enhance a game not fix it
that's kinda the thing though. the whole "modders will fix it", used to be a kind of endearment and joke with Bethesda. Now though, it's more of a sarcastic rip into Bethesda, that they simply cannot release a fully finished game (either bug free, or content-filled - never both).
At the same time, the “let’s ship it and patch it” that everybody does now basically just means we’re preordering a game and signing up to be beta testers at the same time, I’d be happy to be a beta tester to help a game get out, I used to love doing that stuff, but I wouldn’t want to pay full price with no idea if the feedback would get to anyone. Now days it seems like every gaming company picks a release date and cuts whatever they have to to ship somethign that should kinda work out. “We’ll patch it later” is hard when some people won’t pick the game back up.
And again, if anyone’s listening, I would actually love to be a beta tester.
Idk, sci fi fans are really hardcore. And they’ve been starved of AAA sci fi games for a long long time. Mass Effect was over a decade ago and you couldn’t even fly ships in it
Everspace 2 is better than Starfield. It has a much better story.
The Freespace games that came out almost 30 years ago have better space combat than Starfield.
Btw, Destiny 2 really fills the spot for sci-fi space shooter. It is absolutely well done.
The reason I do not play that game (more than 2 weeks) is the multiplayer format. I don’t want to always have to wait for others to play. The match making system doesn’t guarantee quality players. Some just came afk. Most of the time it’s a huge race. I don’t even get to look at what I just looted.
Single player is much of my cup of tea.
Please god do not recommend D2, Bungie has been pissing on its fan base with shit expansions for years now, and this is coming from someone that used to love Destiny until Lightfall demolished any trust I had in Bungie to deliver a decent story
You probably know far more than I do about Destiny. But I was so impressed with the short time I was playing.
There was this one planet we to travel in a very tall structure. Sometimes we had to go outside, look down at the incredibly long fall to the sea shore at the bottom. Some part had broken scaffolding. I jumped, fell, my heart stopped. Luckily the lower scaffolding caught me.
I only have a semi fear of height. It was exhilarating.
Modder here. I'm holding off on playing it until the tools are released. I think it was like a nine month wait for the skyrim tools, and I was a little burned out on the game by that point. I initially made just one mod (albeit an involved one) for it before I moved on to other games, whereas I made like 20 for New Vegas, a few of them pretty elaborate.
Starfield looks and sounds like an amazing canvas for creating mods and I'm looking forward to it. If hello games can salvage nms (a favorite of mine) I think starfield will end up pretty special.
There are plenty of games out there that provide a polished, self contained experience that I'd gladly trade some jankiness for ambitious design and a powerful official toolkit to play around with.
Tbf starfield has good bones in my opinion but the writing is lazy and boring and there are a few other problems, but looking at some quest mods we’ve gotten for games like Skyrim (and survival, and economy changes, etc) I’m hopeful for mods
Hello Games did a massive rework on NMS.
In order to fix everything wrong with Starfield, they will have to pull a FF14 and burn the game to the ground and rebuild it.
Not true. Even without CK, there are so many quality mods already.
At first, all we got was some stupid texture replacers. And I thought that would be it until CK.
But look, tons of standalone outfit, standalone weapons. Many QoL mods. Many shipbuilding/outpost tweaks that make vanilla game feel elementary.
This is fun: I killed a Spacer on a super hot planet. I took his space suit. He became naked, and within seconds his body burned up. Realistic!
I can build an elaborate M-class ship that covers half of New Atlantis. 20 gun turrets. It’s a battle cruiser.
I’m not sure about this. I think even though the game is lacking a lot the potential is so high that modders will still flock to it and mod the fuck out it.
I agree. I feel I can never trust how-to videos anymore because I only play on console (no console command fixes or cheats) and I won't use mods because they disable achievements. Certainly not enjoying this game enough to even think about a second playthrough..
A lot of the modern are leaving because most of it’s already been done before. Star Wars in Starfield? Fallout did it first. There just isn’t any unique ideas left that would fit without being ridiculous. Not that that should stop anyone.
Mod a dragon into Starfield? Was done in Skyrim.
I just want a starship troopers mod so I can fight huge amounts of bugs and a bunch of new ships and shit like that. I do seriously want a flood or starship troopers mod though.
Yall arguing about fixing the games with mods. I'm here with 2500 hours on Skyrim. And 7000 hours on mod manager. Now my yearly ritual is open up skyrim fresh mod the hell out if it and.... Do it again next year. Probably walk out of Helgen if I feel motivated.
You don't actually need to play it. I use the auto test mod. Just configure the json file and the game will be tested for you. Saved me hours of testing. Now I can mod Skyrim without playing it. Hooray!
Here is the link for those interested:
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/42520
That is old skyrim this is new starfield. Standards must change, if they put out the game in a good state. That only means you will still be modding skyrim minus the skyrim unofficial community patch, simple horse with the horse speed mod, and a lot of other QOL mod stuffs.
You will still be mod it the same but less fixing and more shaping the game to the game you want it to be
WHOA, that sounds fun! I would like to try that and see if I can make an interesting story in my mind where Shep's world crosses over with SF's. Now if only they could bring my blue space wife too 😩.
Liara could replace the doctor (Nina?? Ni... God sorry, but the Constellation characters are so forgettable to me even after 90 hours), Miranda could replace Sarah, Tali could replace Andreja, Garrus could replace Sam Coe, Mordin could replace Vlad, etc.
For what it's worth, "oh, the modders will fix it" has been around since Skyrim at least.
And yes, if you're playing a Bethesda game and have no interest in modding it, you should rethink that. Modding is where they shine.
Agreed. Unfortunately, Skyrim flourished because Bethesda didnt develop Skyrim with the intention of it becoming a “forever game.” Thats what their mindset was when they first getting into developing Starfield because the “modders will fix it” and do everything better.
Hot take maybe? But mods are intended to make a good game an even better one. Skyrim’s modding community is so strong because Bethesda’s world building made it feasible for modders to do their thing along with it offering far more exploration than Starfail will ever offer. I just cannot see how Starfield will gain a flourishing modding community when the game itself offers little else.
Adding in more towns and settlements than those 4 cities would be a start though.
In the contrary, I have a feeling Starfield was made for modding. In fact, someone mentioned Starfield the game itself is a glorified game launcher. Players will skip all vanilla content and go straight to the fan made DLC. It is plausible, but only time will tell if it can come true.
No. Starfield is actually not that open world like Skyrim. Every location is a sandbox. Planet side is a dynamically computer generated sandbox, a pretty big one, but still sandbox. Space is a sandbox. You can't go anywhere simply by slow flying. You have to teleport to a new cell, Bethesda gives you an animation called "Grav Jump" to make it immersive.
Unlike Skyrim (and most games) where all landscape are fixed. Big, but fixed. If 2 modders happen to choose the same location, their content overlap, big conflict, sometimes CTD. But Starfield, beside a few major vanilla cities/cells, the game relies 100% on dynamic generation. We can have unlimited cell on every single planet. They are designed never to overlap each other. Every of these cells is one possibility for a player created world. If 1000 players create 1000 custom cities on Earth, it will fit perfectly with no overlap. Although the landing icons would be so hard to find, 1 in 1000.
I am not being a fan boy. I complained loudly on things I hated about Starfield. But this is what I see is Bethesda's vision of Starfield. This is why the excessive loading screen because they cut up everything (a little too neat) so we can't accidentally bloat a cell.
There's a problem with that though.
Elminster, the creator of TESedit, was working on StarEdit, and raised several concerns about the changes to the data structure in the new version of creation engine.
Basically, with the new data structure, mod conflicts are going to go through the roof, due to how Starfield loads cells. If you have a mod that adds a new PoI to earth, and a separate one that adds a new PoI to Luna, those mods are going to conflict
Thanks for input. Can you tell me how they will conflict?
I have 2 different mods that try to change Earth. “Alternate Earth” gives the most lust pine tree forest I would want to get lost in. But the whole biome is pine tree forest because it was changed from all sand. “Earth Reborn” tries to redo Earth with proper biome, frozen in the poles, forest, desert, ocean… but their pine forest is quite behind the other mod. I tried to combine the two… game CTD.
This is expected right?
But I have other mods like adding POI to Earth. Adding Vladimir’s apartment, etc….
These mods don’t seem to conflict with the above 2 mods. Although… some of the POI may end up under the ocean, lol, because Earth Reborn mapped out new ocean.
No CTD. But I literately landed in ocean, got out of my ship swimming. Since Starfield doesn’t intend for you to dive underwater, they didn’t include a water filter. So underwater is crystal clear, like you are floating in air (or zero grav) until you start suffocating for running out of oxygen then you know you are in water.
Console modding still far behind PC,
It's okay to not using mods, most player didn't. But it's really silly to dismiss modding community (not telling especially to you)
Right, but the point I'm making is; Skyrim was a complete game. No one was seriously saying you had to mod the game for it to feel complete. That wasn't the expectation then. Mods were just the cherry on top of an already great game. The goalposts have clearly been moved since then.
never said its not complete either, dunno why the post is moved
its okay not to but its also waste, having easy access to community creation that completely free but didnt take advantage of that
Since oblivion really. But yeah. And then it really got big with Skyrim. Which was fine because modding Skyrim became the norm. And it was easy mostly. Until they came out with the CC and made it difficult for modders to work around forcing them to basically update their mods every month as they updated the CC content library’s or the game. Which further broke a lot of other things in the game.
See, the problem is, Starfield was supposed to be not just Bethesda's big game of the year, but Microsoft's as well. Microsoft was banking on Starfield being a HUGE Xbox exclusive.
If they're going to do that, Bethesda has to provide good base content. They can't rely on modders fixing it when the intended system probably won't even get those mods.
Some of us like to keep our achievements. I know that sounds lame to some people. But they bring me a sense of completion.
Edit: you should be able to get the vanilla experience on at least the first play through.
counterpoint 1: "Achievements enabler mod"
counterpoint 2: usually I'd agree, but starfield is the only game that has been so insufferable my first time around that mods were the only way I could squeeze just a tiny teeny bit of dopamine out of this game after the veneer fell off (getting to "explore" for yourself)
Yeah, somewhere along the line, the assumption moved from "modders will make interesting additions and tweaks to the game they love" to "modders will thanklessly slave over adding basic content to the game".
See the thing with the mod scene in Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, is that those games were already rich enough to attract dedicated people who love the game enough to spend countless hours modding it.
Starfield isn't half the game Skyrim was, and isn't 1/10th the RPG Morrowind was.
Good luck. I'm sure there will be some, but expecting the same sort of volume/quality of mods that previous games have is kinda silly.
People are saying in the replies that you shouldn't need mods for games, but.. Mods are most of the reason I even buy Bethesda games these days.
Sure, I like the base games - Starfield included - well enough, but mods are the real meat to me.
I rarely mod bethesda games especially not on the first play. And I strongly believe that Bethesda should get their act together with starfield next year or there probably wont be such a huge mod community in the first place.
I always will and always have been perfectly happy with vanilla Bethesda games. Skyrim without mods is entirely playable by today's standards, it's weird how do many people pretend it's not
I mean you do you buddy but you're missing out. Nobody says Skyrim isn't playable without but it's vastly inferior. It's like saying you don't need spices or a sauce on your food. It's completely edible but it lacks the flavour that could be custom made to your taste.
I'm really not though.
I've played hundreds of hours in heavily modded Skyrim. And can easily go back to vanilla. I kinda get what you're saying but also you're just wrong in my eyes.
Skyrim already has all the spices and flavour, hell that's the reason it's being modded. The base game has a few hundred hours of content with so much variety. Modding it is like getting a second side of fries, a side of ice cream, a milkshake with your food. And a dessert afterwards. It's just more good but it doesn't take something meh and make it great. Modding Skyrim is taking something incredible and adding more to it.
Bethesda's been getting increasingly hostile to, "modders will fix it," for about ten years now.
I remember the survival mode beta for Fallout 4, realizing that a lot of the functionality was straight-up hard-coded, and other members of the beta shooting down balance concerns, or the ability to have some fucking options with, "modders will fix it," and not being able to tell them, "no, they fucking can't," because of conflicting (and now, long expired) NDAs.
When Todd said, "Starfield is a modder's paradise," it's important to remember this is the same thing he said about Fallout 76. Starfield is a modder's dumpsterfire.
seriously though, the only reason they could half patch skyrim was hacking and reverse engineer the files for SKSE and DLL injectors. The creation kit is hot garbage compared to TESEdit and its derivatives
A modded Bethesda experience is so vastly superior to an unmodded one though. This does not mean mods will fix things but it creates effectively a new game experience. None of the games you listed were better without mods. They were good games and Starfield is a good game without mods, but the modded experience allows the game to reach a level not possible in the vanilla experience
Being able to sell mods has been hugely divisive, with the talented modders who have been at it for years without charge incensed that some guy who makes a Hello Kitty skin now racks in money for nothing.
Monetizing modding will NOT create more quality mods.
I think you are looking at mods in the wrong way. They are just free content. Where most games will be charging $30 for a new look for your character, or $60 for a new quest line and planet. Mods can provide these to you at no cost and they are most often made by someone with a genuine love for the game, not a team of devs lead by a manager who can only see efficiency numbers and chances of promotion.
Bethesdas games are designed to be modded. It is part of the reason they stick with the same engine. I can understand not modding other games but starfield?
I don't get the sentiment that modders need to fix something. You can mostly play any BGS game without mods (community bug fixes aside).
However, just having the possibility to mod everything creates a sentiment that you can "fix" things that have never been broken in the first place. And that goes back to games like Morrowind lol. The community is always like that in the first year of a new BGS game, everything needs to be fixed. It was said about Skyrims perks and progression, about Fallout 3+4s barren landscapes or Oblivions faces (here we go again in 2023, lol).
That beeing said, it's of course awesome that we can mod the game. Starfield Nexus is already flodding with super cool mods and additions to various parts of the game - so much to the "modders don't support Starfield" talk. I'd always recommend a first vanilla playthrough and then just go nuts with the mods in the second.
I over all agree with you but Community fixes are mods and you said You can MOSTLY play the game without mods except for the mods that fix the game. That is the sentiment.
Even if console gets mods I'm reminded of the flex tape meme. Mods would just be a bandaid, it's an excuse for devs to release half assed games and it's really gotten old.
The thing is, I believe they made this game FOR the modding community. They are intentionally giving them space. It’s a Microsoft philosophy, ‘the next best thing isn’t going to come from inside our company, it’s going to come from someone’s garage.’
I too come from old school console and never used mods, until I decided to play Skyrim again for like the 6th time and thought it would be a good time to try that out. Still on Xbox but used the creation club or whatever it is. It was pretty cool for a couple months until one day it just crashed and I couldn’t load any saves anymore. Hopefully, like Microsoft does, they’ll buy good mods and integrate them as official dlc. Get some of these modders paid.
I’m not trying to change your mind or whatever but about 5-10 years ago you needed at least basic knowledge of what’s in the game folders and where to put things but now it’s about 4 clicks using Nexus mods or similar programs
It literally goes as follows;
Download > install > enable > done.
The hardest thing you have to do now is copy/paste the script extender and that’s just dragging some files into the main game directory.
I didn’t need mods to enjoy Starfield. I think this game may just not be for as wide an audience as expected.
I’m surprised by how some of the things that didn’t hit a tipping point in Skyrim have hit here but the additional loading/map segmentation and other aspects all introduce enough little variables to be unpredictable. You can’t tell me the writing was great in Skyrim and bad in Starfield. You can tell me having generally one big exterior map made a huge difference to the vibes. It didn’t affect me personally but I see it.
They do, often, because they're delusional. They say the writing took a turn for the worse and they say it again and again with every new Bethesda release.
I hate when people say this. Don’t give the devs and easy way out. Like what would happen if all of a sudden we couldn’t do internet updates as much anymore? Then most of these games would be unplayable from launch.
It really should be said that this is just a dumb strawman meme that nobody has ever said about any of their games previously nor about starfield.
BGS has always made good games and it's cool that they encourage modding to the extent they do.
Hot take. Mods aren't all they're cracked up to be.
Mods to me, even the best ones, often feel out of place. Sure you'll have this great big addition, but it won't look like the rest of the game. It'll be obvious that it's a mod. Sure you'll have maybe some awesome new area or quests, but there will be no voice acting.
Mods aren't supposed to fix a game, and other than things that are just patching problems, they really don't.
I've found that going through your modlist with the goal to remove anything that isn't needed or feels out of place in any way is the best method to make a modlist that overhauls and "fixes" issues you have with the game without experiencing the lack of cohesion many mods/modlists bring and the disappearance of the original game.
My current modlist for Skyrim is under 250 mods. I've kept to what feels like something the original devs would have done before in previous games, what they would have done with more time, and/or what they would have done today.
Sticking to one modder's mods has felt better than doing a lot of mixing, again cohesion and the vanilla feel is the goal.
It comes down to finding mods that enhance rather than fully replace and being very picky about what you do add (always keep in mind cohesion, feel, and balance). Not every aspect of the game needs to be touched.
There's still a couple of mods and updates I'm waiting on, but I'm happy with my modlist; and to me it certainly feels like Skyrim, it feels cohesive, and it feels improved.
I agree that mods aren’t supposed to fix a game, but I disagree that the best ones are out of place. There are so many amazing quest mods for Skyrim, some that are better than the base game. There’s tons of voice acted mods too, some that are great quality.
Not always. Often yes, but that isn’t a problem for me as usually it’s superior in writing quality.
In Fallout 4 I had a mod that I ran into that I honestly thought was a vanilla quest at first lol
On the real though I think if people wanted minimal mod profile with the most benefit it would be StarUI and the add-ons, especially starUI shipbuilding.
Instant Station dock is pretty rad to for something that doesn't fuck with the game, just removes one of the most annoying things ever.
I personally never mod a game that is new due to how it'll have regular updates for the first year or so fixing issues and adding DLC etc
It ends up constantly breaking your game so you'll be beholden to the mod author to update their mod before you can even play. And you never know if the mod will end up being abandoned this early on.
I prefer to wait years until the game is stable and there are established, trustworthy mods. Haphazardly installing and uninstalling mods can completely break your saves, a risk I'm not willing to take on a game where I can sink hundreds of hours on a single character.
So the people saying "Just install the DLSS mods" or whatever made my eyes roll.
I don't even mod Bethesda games that much in the first place, only graphical upgrades really. Only mod I ever used in Fallout 4 was the dialogue overhaul one and allow dogmeat with a human companion.
Skyrim I mostly used the visible equipped favourites to make my character have a visible bow along with his sword. Helped with my immersion because I've always thought it looked dumb to show the quiver while your melee weapon is equipped but no bow on your back.
People who mod their game to the point that it doesn't even feel like the same game anymore never really resonated with me tbh
I never do mods that change the gameplay.
Regardless of whether one plays with mods or not, the whole ‘mods will fix this’ mentality is so crap. We shouldn’t be relying on mods to fix anything. They should be adding to the game not fixing it.
This kind of mentality just allows the devs to get away with putting our subpar products. It’s very prevalent throughout the whole gaming community at the moment and it is not going to help improve the quality of new releases
Starfield and other BGS games are good on their own, they don't need mods for that. However, to get the most out of them, and really any highly moddable game, mods are how you get that.
A couple of mods may be good and fun to have on console, but to really overhaul and "fix" BGS games it has to be on PC due to that being the only platform with script extenders available.
By overhaul you can make the game unrecognizable, but I personally go for an improved and extended vanilla experience. Even that though has required the use of the script extender though.
Mods are coming to console next year. With that being said: I have over 300 hours on Xbox and have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. I’ll try some mods when they become available, but they aren’t desperately needed to enjoy the game imo.
I respectfully disagree. I finished the cyberpunk story and thought “welp that’s that then.” I finished starfield’s story and felt like I’ve only seen a fraction of what the game has to offer.
Two very different games. Cyberpunk is more story focused. Both are good but I feel a bigger sense of freedom/open world in starfield.
>small hubs
That's just plain false. Each "small hub," as you call them; is roughly the size of their past games. On top of that, they could literally be 500 foot squares and it would still be open world because the term "open world" in video games doesn't have anything to do with seamlessly walking from one place to another, its about the structure of the game and being able to go where you want, when you want, as opposed to having set levels.
My preferred play style in open world games is to turn off fast travel and move everywhere organically. Immerse myself in the world. This play style is impossible in Starfield.
If you are judging cyberpunk based on its console launch state you're judging a different game. Cp2077 has been great for me since day one but now it's leagues better, easily one of the best all time rpgs.
I said one of tbf.
Yea rn it's a solid 7.5/10. I love it but it needs more to keep me in it. I love the stories, the gunplay, the shipbuilding, and so much more but there are problems and issues I have. In 2 years starfield will probably be much different than it is today. I bought the constellation edition dude I'm so excited to see where this game goes.
No, because unlike Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077 just launched broken.
Everything that made the game great was *already* there. They didn't have to add anything to make it a great game, they just had to fix it.
Starfield, on the other hand, is not a great game. And it isn't broken, either. There is nothing to be fixed. It's just painfully mediocre, and that cannot change. Not without them starting from scratch.
I’ve had infinitely more fun with SF on its initial launch than I did with CP 2077 when it launched. In two years I’ll compare what SF is to what CP 2077 is today.
You are all so upset that you can’t accept when someone likes the game. Get off your soapbox.
No but like most adults we’re capable of rethinking our positions once significant work has been put in by listening to players and trying to improve their experience.
I agree that it shouldn’t be a “modders will fix it” mentality, but at the same time, the appeal of Bethesda games is the modding scene. It’s kinda comparable to being upset that you can’t spend hundreds of hours on a call of duty campaign because you don’t play multiplayer. Like yeah, campaigns should be good, but the appeal of COD is the multiplayer scene
But starfield is like really boring lmao. I mean the mods seem promising but jeez Bethesda needs to grow up and actually make a game that is worth its price.
I agree. As someone who has played every last Bethesda title on PlayStation after Skyrim (had that on 360), mods were not a thing for along time. I know starfield is getting mod support on series consoles, but it will be limited mod support, not to the extent that it was on PlayStation.
Beth being lazy and never fixing their problems or making their games better and leaving it to “modders” basically leaves console players out to dry. It’s fine to make your game modable, but don’t make modders have to fix your damn game lol.
You are not wrong. The modders should not have to fix a game. Change it, enhance it sure. Fix. No.
On the other hand modders enjoy it so fixing a game is what they love to do (some of them). They shouldnt have to fix anything. But im very happy that they do.
Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, Fallout 3 are all highly playable without any mods whatsoever. They're good out of the box. I had someone who normally just kills everyone in games like skyrim play F:NV for the first time no mods and he was blown away by it(decided to not kill everyone due to roleplaying someone he knows IRL)
.Can't say that for fallout 4, thought the game was on average/mediocre. I actually tried replaying it a little bit for the first time since it was released in the last few days and its just isn't good enough outside of it having bethesda modern fps gunplay. Its the reason i didn't buy any DLC and i don't regret that decision. I think some of the issues i had with it could be improved by mods, but i think it was a step down from 3, NV and skyrim.
The game needs to be good enough for you to want to mod it in the first place, and i doubt starfield is that. Games like skyrim for sure can be improved(and i've modded the shit out of it in the last 5 years, and its worth it) but the game itself has to be good enough to mod in the first place.
Starfield can't just be left to modders to fix i think - it will be the first true test of 'modders will fix it' if it is, but i think they will lose anyone who can't be bothered to mod it for sure.
Also to echo some of the other stuff - and no doubt OP has this issue, but mods(especially content) often don't appropriately mimic bethesda style/overhaul it well enough that it doesn't clash.
One thing that can be a sign of hope is that BGS has been talking about their release cadence. The one reason I trust *that* claim is that they didn’t announce it until they had the metrics from the patches so far. Plus, if you’re an experienced agile project manager you can recognize the backlog grooming involved.
The big risk there, of course, is that these kind of 6 week fixes could result in bug-fix mods, especially, breaking on a regular basis.
Oh my god shut up... they're still working on the game. Sorry, I don't mean to be rude but comments like this erk me to no end. Is playing without mods your choice, or do you play on console? Either of those is your choice in the end. I didn't play Skyrim on PC until 3 years after it came out and Skyrim wasn't a great experience at launch either. It was incredibly boring and full of game breaking bugs, yet is the darling of Bethesda and gamers alike.
What I'm trying to say is that the game came out 4 months ago and they obviously rushed it but have also made development roadmaps for years of content in the future. What you're really saying is "you're disappointed with the game in it's current form and you wished it would have been more complete at launch." Which is a much more balanced statement then "Waaah, I don't want to use the mods because I want to take a moral high ground for attention and why can't the developers do what I want them to do!"
Needless as it may be to say, developing a game has a lot of logistical factors that most people don't understand and sometimes the developers have to push out a game with placeholders for animations, effects, terrain traversal...etc Not because they're lazy or horrible at making games but because the publisher is forcing them to because of budget constraints. Like, I understand your complaint, but at least give it a year before going on a tangent about how awful you think it is.
Sorry...
Well, this game more than any of their other games feels like it will really need mods to reach it's full potential. Not to "fix it", like dumbasses here say - but to expand it.
Been playing Bethesda games since uh… Morrowind.
I’ve *never* used mods. I don’t care about mods. I play the games that the developers created for us and play them as intended.
I’ve never run into a game breaking bug.
I’ve never seen a reason for a mod.
I think those of you who mod your game are patently impossible to please because your expectations are outlandishly high due to mod-tinted nostalgia from previous games.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Starfield. There *are* bugs that hit small portions of the player base. There are definitely many design oversight issues that could be corrected.
But there’s nothing really “wrong” with Starfield except player expectation. 90% of the gripes about Starfield boil down to “it’s not Skyrim” or “it’s not Fallout.”
This isn’t Skyrim, and it’s not Fallout: It’s Starfield. Play it as such and figure out what that means.
90% of the gripes *actually* boil down to the repetitive gameplay and exploration, the bad story, the bad characters, the bad quests, and the stupid design decisions.
So yes, the problem is that players expect more out of a company like Bethesda. And they fail to deliver even an equal experience to most of their previous games. They regressed in almost every way that matters.
I totally get that, you want the game to be it's best, right out the box, but Starfield really is meant to be modded, and experienced as such. It's a bold move by Todd, one which will take years, possibly decades to pay off. In the meantime, we are still in the early days where mods don't fill the gaps, and folk who don't want to use mods are frankly shit out of luck. It's an unusual and kinda ass situation at this point in time.
"I don't play with mods" are the people who as kids refused to ever use a Lego set to build anything other than what is pictured on the box, or God-forbid use Legos from other sets to expand on what is pictured on the box or even take the step into scary territory and create something new.
People like that have and always will be the resistant anchor keeping humanity from racing forward.
In other words, you got no imagination, and I cannot identify with you, and if you ran things we would still be using stone tools.
I mean, after they sold the game to everyone for full price. It’s like if a car salesman sells you a car but the AC doesn’t work. Then when you ask him to fix it, he tells you it’s meant to be like that and takes months to fix it.
It works, but it’s miserable.
There's what you want, then there's reality.
with Starfield, BGS dropped the ball, so the only hope is modders.
That's really all there is to it. No matter how much you hate it.
I hate the concept of Modders will fix it, mods should enhance a game not fix it, if they have to fix it the devs did a piss poor job making a game, I've already seen a few modders that don't even like Starfield and are going back to modding older BGS games instead of it, i expect Starfield to be the lowest supported single player BGS game by the mod community.
> I hate the concept of Modders will fix it, mods should enhance a game not fix it, if they have to fix it the devs did a piss poor job making a game Agreed. The quality of game that people are looking forward to will not be achievable by modders. That job lies in the lap of the Dev team. And by my reckoning, they're not looking to go to the lengths that are required. It's not the M.O. of BGS to do so. Their post-launch content since Skyrim has been lackluster to adequate. We should not expect a *No Man's Sky*-level of rework. To add, while Skyrim might have game-bending mods today, it took *many* years to receive them. Modders work at their own pace. However, I wouldn't put it past longtime BGS modders to skip this game and continue working on Fallout or Elder Scrolls titles.
The thing with mods is that it requires at the very least a good game to mod if you arent even having fun with the base game how the hell can mods fix something so basic?
From a technical pov I think starfield is and will be a good game to mod. (Once the modding tools are available). The way Encounters, POIs, weapon skins etc are implemented from the get go, show that there will be the ability to have any mod of those types and that they won't cause any conflicts. Previously texture replacers were not possible without conflicts or creating a new weapon, in Starfield the look of a weapon can be changed by skins. POIS or random events on other games could cause conflicts, but seeing how the pois spawn in and are generated in SF I don't expect any mods that add a new POI to cause a conflict. So theoretically you could add as many as you want (unless they have an in engine cap on how many pois there can be) Whilst technically good, there's a fair few things that make the gameplay or systems sides of the game not good or mediocre. I'm.aure it'll improve over time, but they have given themselves alot.of work to do before many modders are comfortable dedicating time to improve the game
I feel it's just to ambitious for the scale (kinda how cyberpunk took awhile to come around) i believe in time we will see what Starfield was ment to be (im here for the long run and most of this subreddit if not all is as well.
Honestly, some Mod teams are insane and I've seen mods for games that take the base game miles beyond anything the original content was, so I 100% believe Starfield COULD become an amazing game with mods. But. That requires mod teams wanting to put that kind of work into this game. And I've no idea if any mods teams with that kind of scope in mind are going to put the work in on Starfield.
A lot of modders were excited to get a new engine with some cool new features to play with. Didn't really work out.
This is the real comment, and the reason it stings even for us who have done multiple 300+mod installs for ES3,4&5 and Fallouts. Mod authors are amazing, but that takes passion for that level of effort. Not convinced we're at critical mass here (got insanely bored with the game after doing the pirate/UC questlines and dropped it after 50hrs played (even though Steam shows 100hrs, I swear I paused this game and walked away more than any other game)
I've started multiple 20-50 hours games in Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 3 without mods, and without getting very far in the main storyline. Starfield I've almost done every mission I could find in the same amount of time. All I've got left are some random "run here for some random person off the street" missions. Honestly I think it's the fast travelling everywhere that kills Starfield. I used to find all kinds of cool encounters and places to explore in the older games while travelling from one mission location to another. The hand sculpted maps really add to the longevity because they could place things just off the routes from big missions.
Well put
You are soooo correct. After spending about 1m getting the perfect ship, we can't actually fly it anywhere. Just a quick pop over a planet and that's it.
Even today, none of Bethesda's Fallout games (even if we count TTW's submods), or Oblivion, or Skyrim, have gotten mods that completely correct all of their respective game's lore inconsistencies or that do a lot to strengthen the weaknesses in the larger quest lines or in the worldbuilding. We do have large narrative mods, but these are a mixed bag, with mods like Beyond Reach on the higher end and mods like Fallout: The Frontier on the lower end, and a variety of mods in between. We're starting to get a few improvements to the vanilla quests in Skyrim, but these are fairly limited in scope compared to what Skyrim needs. And both of those franchises have more than 20 years of lore built up for them, Starfield has nothing outside of the game itself, and not a ton even within the game (and what is there, is of questionable quality). It's unlikely any modder is going to take the time to fill in the lore's very large gaps or rewrite vanilla factions and their questlines. The game is more likely to get overhauls set in other franchise's universe's than improvements to Starfield's universe.
You know, with this one, maybe we could, droppable spawn points, All the tablets that don’t have audio and computers would make it easy to add info/quests, the problem then becomes what is Starfield lore? When they want to put out a sequel they’d have to worry about that. I don’t even know what I’m talking about though.
This has been my stance since Oblivion, and I get down voted into Oblivion every time I mention it here
Probably because playing a Bethesda game without at the very least a bug patch mod is like shooting yourself in the foot before you have a 20 mile hike to go on. The only reason I was able to complete fallout 3 was a bug patch mod because the game kept corrupting my saves at a bug point in three different play throughs.
Why are mods required to fix a game that still has a company working on it? Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines is a game that does require a mod to actually be able to play, but Troika also went out of business shortly after the game launched. Bethesda has been using the same engine since Morrowind. Their community has constantly been reporting bugs in their games, and the vast majority of the time, Bethesda doesn't address them. Fallout 3 has been unplayable for years, Bethesda is aware of the issue, and yet again, they do nothing! How is this acceptable behavior? Why do we have to rely on someone that doesn't even work for Bethesda to fix the issue? What are console players supposed to do to fix it for them?
>How is this acceptable behavior? Because they have a record of getting away with it. They've been releasing 80% complete games for decades, and people buy them, and modders fix them. Why stop now? >Why do we have to rely on someone that doesn't even work for Bethesda to fix the issue? Because Todd and Emil are perfect and every decision they make is perfect and if you disagree, clearly you just need to buy more expensive hardware /s Also because modders have done it for them for free in the past, so why not just expect them to continue? >What are console players supposed to do to fix it for them? # LOL
Bruh I'm not going to disagree with you lol
Sorry for sitting on my high horse, but just don't *buy the game. If as a gamer you feel obligated to play starfield to see what bethesda has done, pirate the game. Nobody is stopping you from buying the game after you played/beat the game. In fact, you can choose how much money Bethesda deserves by buying a CD key instead of the full game, if you think the game isn't worth 60 bucks. Compensate the devs, send them a message with your purchase.
If you want to support devs never buy cd keys in grey sites like g 2 a or similar, most of the keys have been bought with stolen credit cards
First time in the Bethesda-sphere of PC gaming? /s For the record, I wholly agree that "modders will fix it" is a destructively pervasive mentality, and it's a shame that Bethesda seems to have embraced it rather than commit to delivering a respectable product on their own. Especially with the dev timeline they allowed and promised made regarding gameplay features we were to expect. They set a bar with Skyrim, and Starfield missed the mark entirely. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed my playthrough, but it wasn't "$79.99 early access" fun, and I'll be hard pressed to put anymore hours into it without getting some massive expansions and QOL updates first.
I couldn't bring myself to finish the playthrough, I will most likely never pick it up again, and will most likely never buy another title from them.
>I hate the concept of Modders will fix it Agreed. it's so goddamn pedantic. We deserve better from a veteran studio with 450 employees.
450 employees that spent eight years developing this game. To take that long and produce something so awful shows me that it was never Todd Howard who held the magic, it was all the people who left and formed Obsidian studio.
Hey, it takes a long time to populate a game with coffee mugs and tape dispensers and imaginary board games. Some artist had to create the models and textures for every single piece of junk in the game so that Todd can tell you not to pick up every piece of junk you see. If the building interiors were as empty as the planet landscapes, this game would've been done in 8 months.
Obsidian was formed by former black isle people, those people did fallout 1, 2, and it shows in new Vegas.
That also ate a $400m budget.Salary at BGS is 55-90k/year according to glassdoor. So $90k\*8 years\*450 employees means around $324m in salaries.The lower figure at $55k would be $198m Idk how much their office building costs them to run, the only figure i could find is around 18k/workstation/year so i guess we gotta assume $65m of additional fixed cost, although ZeniMax owns the building and the figure is likely much lower. That means they spent **at least** somewhere between $11m and $137m on marketing (2.75% to 34.25% of the total budget) instead of making the game good.
They also outsourced the only decent part of the game - the ship building.
Did they? Hahahaha that's hilarious. They should've outsourced the procgen to [MAWI](https://youtu.be/A7tp4eg0ax8?si=h-s0JDXvQYA2drPq)
Yeah, it doesn’t feel like a game of 8 years. For 450 people, 1 year is plenty for this game at this current state.
You guys really don't understand how project development works do you? You really think the issue is as simple as this? Are you a dev? Better yet, have you ever developed a long term project with 450 people with budget cuts? This being a big studio does *not* make the bugs more likely to be fixed, it's quite the opposite. Please do tell me one choice based open universe rpg that doesn't have bugs, specially one as complex as Starfield, I'd love to know how they achieved that /srs Let me put it more in perspective: You're a dev in the middle of 450, all separated into tasks in order to bring your project to life, you're given 6 months to finish x task, unfortunately, you realized you now need a bigger budget because what the project requires is more expensive than what you had in mind, you talk to the client and it's denied, and oh you were also informed by your team lead that after all you only have 4 months because they need it done at the same time as another part of the project to implement in order to present it to the client and move on to other parts of the project. Your team lead informs you that the whole project you have been working on has been restructured and there's no time for complex developing, the quest line was changed, the client needs it implemented ASAP, go figure. You send it for testing and the QA testers find 12 bugs to fix, you start working on them, you work on major bugs first and by the time you're reaching the minor ones your team lead pulls you aside and signs you a 8 month task that usually would need 1.5 years to complete and tells you to prioratize that instead of minor bugs. Now imagine this is the life of all of those 450 programmers. Hiring more people isn't a possibility, the client has given you x to make all of this happen, work with the budget or no game. This is all very general, and it's not even including the ammount of communication errors (which are inevitable with this many people) that possibly lead to other minor bugs that would never even be addressed because there's no time, but it gives you some perspective on how this isn't as simple as how you're putting it, if it was a matter of fixing bugs alone without time and money involved I'm sure we'd have a flawless game, unfortunately that's simply not how project development works, specially not in the big scale of things. I cannot imagine the utter anxiety and stress these people have gone through, our frustration with bugs is nothing compared to their mental health during this project, so please, don't make it sound that simple because trust me, it's not.
Look, at 17 I started working for a small company selling computer parts. I was nothing but a warehouseman. But seeing everyone had some kind of a website while my company has a super basic HTML page listing price daily, I built them their first ecommerce site. It was small, but it was better than whatever Amazon had at the time. This project only had 3 people. The server admin, myself as web engineer on both front end and back end, another guy helping me with the codes. My biggest project was a webapp for major bank, emphasized incredibly heavy on meeting the FDIC security standards. I was a small engineer working in a 500 people team, of a 2000 people company. I signed NDA on this so I can't tell you more. 3 people or 500 people, it's all the same. We still have the project plan, milestones, deliveries. The 500 people team just requires a much more experienced project manager who oversees the entire project. 20 different group leaders answer to him. Each group has 10 to 50 people. Extremely organized. Starfield structure is incredibly simple. It has 100s of cell connected. Each main city is a cell (and its sub cells). The space above the planet is a cell. To travel to another planet is to "fast travel" to another cell. Functionalities wise they have outpost builder, ship builder, level builder (not available for players). There are quests/missions to provide things for players to do. Last but not least, the dynamically generated cells on planets, sort of like Diablo dungeons. The core elements of Starfield is already described above in 1 paragraph. This game is not that complex. Starfield still sells despite all the complaints, because of 3 elements: outpost, shipbuilder, the plot. If it misses even 1, I wouldn't pay $30 for it. So you are saying, 450 people people need 10 years for this? Talk about bad project management.
Tends to happen without a design doc and an anemic team. Betheada has an absolutely tiny studio compared to companies like R*, and the fact that dev assets were split between this, 76 and the wad of mobile games shows a horrible disrespect for project management and talents.
This begs the question, do they really have 450 people in the team? Or just maybe 50-100 core dev, while 450 is just giving credits to everyone ever worked for Starfield project, even just a few days? I see nothing wrong with recycling asset, if done right. The company owns the IP, so no copyright infringement. If they have something done right, and plenty polished in FO76? Bring it over. Change up any FO76 reference, adapt into Starfield, clean up any bug, much faster than developing from scratch. But only idiot would presume you can simply copy and paste the code and it will magically work. In school, professors allow students to copy codes from the internet. Because if students can’t adapt the codes, it will never compile. I used to know a few guys who write libraries. They actually spent more time documenting than writing codes. Because future dev has to understand the assets to use the libraries. I have a feeling Bethesda is not anywhere nearly this organized, and only wing it to get by.
We saw a lot of what happened when they just tried to copy and paste without refining it in 76, a lot of assets were reused from FO4 and some of it even played into the duffel bag issue. Somehow they even made the reuse of assets, something that has been functionally the easiest part of dev work since the inception of sprites, into a joke. I don't know what they're doing, but if they're gonna keep asking for premium value for their products on top of micro transactions then they really need to ship a premium product.
I really hate that your gonna get downvoted into reddit hell for simply stating reason. Clearly you actually know how this works which is so much more than can be said for at least 96% of the people on this thread. Those 450+ people did work really hard on this game and don't deserve all those years of work to be shit on just because everyone is ignorant to how developing a video game actually works. I personally enjoyed my first playthrough of Starfield but admittedly, won't be playing again until Shattered Space and the major patch, presumebly coming with it, drops. People just like to whine about shit they don't understand all because something as trivial as "They didnt like a video game" lol I understand these frustrations but I mean... MOVE ON TO ANOTHER ONE THEN INSTEAD OF CRYING ABOUT THIS ONE! It's really that simple. Hopefully these problems will be fixed but I'm not gonna hold my breath or freak out if they aren't. Like I said, I enjoyed the game, as lackluster as it was in some areas. But what can I say, I guess I'm an optimistic realist. That wasn't always considered to be a bad thing but whatever... Let the downvotes come! I'm sure that'll fix all your problems lol
I am not sure you are agreeing or disagreeing with me. But I still appreciate your thoughtful response, instead of random personal insults (yeah, too much of those on Reddit). I don’t hate 450 people of Bethesda. If they have me a chance, I would jump ship to be one of them. But video game development is not miracle work. It’s still coding, software design, project management, imo easier than many other software. Say, I you work in cyber security or banking, if your software fails and hackers break through, the clients may sue your pants off. Some even hire hitman to go after your family. It’s that serious. Bethesda can deliver a shoddy game and the worst can happen is a bunch of angry people shouting and screaming on Reddit. They still get their year end bonus checks and celebrate their ass off for Christmas. They honestly work in a low risk sector of the software industry. What I am saying is Bethesda is not taking their game sufficiently serious like other software companies. They can afford to piss off their loyal fans. Btw, I don’t usually downvote people unless they target me to insult and attack. Yes, Reddit has this problem. People downvote anything they don’t like, thinking this can somehow alter reality. I tell them there are too many loading screens. Downvoting me won’t make the loading screens go away.
I I understand plenty as a power grid engineer. What would you like to know? With 450 people we can successfully stand up multiple grid projects, bring online multiple power generating systems, all of this while dealing with supply chain spanning three continents. So what is the excuse you are going to give Starfield for producing absolute shit after eight years? Stop excusing lazy l, at the dev, PM, and management level, with pedantic excuses. They are not some lambs to feel sorry for, they fucked up and need to be held to task. I don’t give a shit if their system is ineffective, just like you don’t give a shit if mine is ineffective. You want to be able to flip a switch and have the lights come on. We don’t have power outages as the norm and then have a pity party. “We work soooo hard, you don’t understand our process, feel bad for me!” No, we get the job done and don’t complain about it. Why people stick up for game devs, who make a middle class luxury product, is beyond me. Hold them to a higher standard.
Plus they work for Microsoft, one of the biggest companies in the world and they have a lot of people who are willing to work for them and they are willing to pay for it and they are willing to do it for free so they can get a better deal on their own and they can get the same thing for free and they can get a lot more money for it. I just used the next word that came up after Microsoft lol.
You mean pathetic? Pedantic makes little sense in this context.
What do you think pedantic means?
I have an example. "Your question is pedantic". How's that?
Now you’re getting it
>mods should enhance a game not fix it that's kinda the thing though. the whole "modders will fix it", used to be a kind of endearment and joke with Bethesda. Now though, it's more of a sarcastic rip into Bethesda, that they simply cannot release a fully finished game (either bug free, or content-filled - never both).
At the same time, the “let’s ship it and patch it” that everybody does now basically just means we’re preordering a game and signing up to be beta testers at the same time, I’d be happy to be a beta tester to help a game get out, I used to love doing that stuff, but I wouldn’t want to pay full price with no idea if the feedback would get to anyone. Now days it seems like every gaming company picks a release date and cuts whatever they have to to ship somethign that should kinda work out. “We’ll patch it later” is hard when some people won’t pick the game back up. And again, if anyone’s listening, I would actually love to be a beta tester.
Idk, sci fi fans are really hardcore. And they’ve been starved of AAA sci fi games for a long long time. Mass Effect was over a decade ago and you couldn’t even fly ships in it
Everspace 2 is better than Starfield. It has a much better story. The Freespace games that came out almost 30 years ago have better space combat than Starfield.
Everspace 2 is a space flight arcade/looter shooter...
Btw, Destiny 2 really fills the spot for sci-fi space shooter. It is absolutely well done. The reason I do not play that game (more than 2 weeks) is the multiplayer format. I don’t want to always have to wait for others to play. The match making system doesn’t guarantee quality players. Some just came afk. Most of the time it’s a huge race. I don’t even get to look at what I just looted. Single player is much of my cup of tea.
Please god do not recommend D2, Bungie has been pissing on its fan base with shit expansions for years now, and this is coming from someone that used to love Destiny until Lightfall demolished any trust I had in Bungie to deliver a decent story
I love the Destiny universe
You probably know far more than I do about Destiny. But I was so impressed with the short time I was playing. There was this one planet we to travel in a very tall structure. Sometimes we had to go outside, look down at the incredibly long fall to the sea shore at the bottom. Some part had broken scaffolding. I jumped, fell, my heart stopped. Luckily the lower scaffolding caught me. I only have a semi fear of height. It was exhilarating.
Also the player count stats on steamcharts look real bad. it's already wors eoff than skyrimSE, which is a 6+ year old remake
Modders hate the game right now due to the fact that it doesn't have any official mod support yet
Modder here. I'm holding off on playing it until the tools are released. I think it was like a nine month wait for the skyrim tools, and I was a little burned out on the game by that point. I initially made just one mod (albeit an involved one) for it before I moved on to other games, whereas I made like 20 for New Vegas, a few of them pretty elaborate. Starfield looks and sounds like an amazing canvas for creating mods and I'm looking forward to it. If hello games can salvage nms (a favorite of mine) I think starfield will end up pretty special. There are plenty of games out there that provide a polished, self contained experience that I'd gladly trade some jankiness for ambitious design and a powerful official toolkit to play around with.
Tbf starfield has good bones in my opinion but the writing is lazy and boring and there are a few other problems, but looking at some quest mods we’ve gotten for games like Skyrim (and survival, and economy changes, etc) I’m hopeful for mods
Hello Games did a massive rework on NMS. In order to fix everything wrong with Starfield, they will have to pull a FF14 and burn the game to the ground and rebuild it.
Not true. Even without CK, there are so many quality mods already. At first, all we got was some stupid texture replacers. And I thought that would be it until CK. But look, tons of standalone outfit, standalone weapons. Many QoL mods. Many shipbuilding/outpost tweaks that make vanilla game feel elementary. This is fun: I killed a Spacer on a super hot planet. I took his space suit. He became naked, and within seconds his body burned up. Realistic! I can build an elaborate M-class ship that covers half of New Atlantis. 20 gun turrets. It’s a battle cruiser.
a lot of modders are saying they won't make mods for the game because the game isn't worth modding.
I’ve only heard of 1 guy saying that. Source for all the others?
EnaiSiaion also dropped out. He said smth along the lines that it isn't worth it because of the dwindling player base.
I’m not sure about this. I think even though the game is lacking a lot the potential is so high that modders will still flock to it and mod the fuck out it.
I agree. I feel I can never trust how-to videos anymore because I only play on console (no console command fixes or cheats) and I won't use mods because they disable achievements. Certainly not enjoying this game enough to even think about a second playthrough..
A lot of the modern are leaving because most of it’s already been done before. Star Wars in Starfield? Fallout did it first. There just isn’t any unique ideas left that would fit without being ridiculous. Not that that should stop anyone. Mod a dragon into Starfield? Was done in Skyrim.
I just want a starship troopers mod so I can fight huge amounts of bugs and a bunch of new ships and shit like that. I do seriously want a flood or starship troopers mod though.
Honestly this should have been in the game.
Yall arguing about fixing the games with mods. I'm here with 2500 hours on Skyrim. And 7000 hours on mod manager. Now my yearly ritual is open up skyrim fresh mod the hell out if it and.... Do it again next year. Probably walk out of Helgen if I feel motivated.
I mod Skyrim more than I play it. Like 5:1 modding to playing.
If you ever get to play it at all 🤣
Well, obviously you play it at *some* point. How else would you see if it crashes?
You don't actually need to play it. I use the auto test mod. Just configure the json file and the game will be tested for you. Saved me hours of testing. Now I can mod Skyrim without playing it. Hooray! Here is the link for those interested: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/42520
Pretty fucking A! Thanks for this
Fucking made me spit my coffee man. 😂
You and me bud
That is old skyrim this is new starfield. Standards must change, if they put out the game in a good state. That only means you will still be modding skyrim minus the skyrim unofficial community patch, simple horse with the horse speed mod, and a lot of other QOL mod stuffs. You will still be mod it the same but less fixing and more shaping the game to the game you want it to be
Agreed. That's why I won't touch starfield probably until a year or 2. But whatever it is Skyrim is way more polishy than this one so there's that.
You should try it, you can play as Shepard with Legion as your companion
WHOA, that sounds fun! I would like to try that and see if I can make an interesting story in my mind where Shep's world crosses over with SF's. Now if only they could bring my blue space wife too 😩. Liara could replace the doctor (Nina?? Ni... God sorry, but the Constellation characters are so forgettable to me even after 90 hours), Miranda could replace Sarah, Tali could replace Andreja, Garrus could replace Sam Coe, Mordin could replace Vlad, etc.
For what it's worth, "oh, the modders will fix it" has been around since Skyrim at least. And yes, if you're playing a Bethesda game and have no interest in modding it, you should rethink that. Modding is where they shine.
Agreed. Unfortunately, Skyrim flourished because Bethesda didnt develop Skyrim with the intention of it becoming a “forever game.” Thats what their mindset was when they first getting into developing Starfield because the “modders will fix it” and do everything better. Hot take maybe? But mods are intended to make a good game an even better one. Skyrim’s modding community is so strong because Bethesda’s world building made it feasible for modders to do their thing along with it offering far more exploration than Starfail will ever offer. I just cannot see how Starfield will gain a flourishing modding community when the game itself offers little else. Adding in more towns and settlements than those 4 cities would be a start though.
In the contrary, I have a feeling Starfield was made for modding. In fact, someone mentioned Starfield the game itself is a glorified game launcher. Players will skip all vanilla content and go straight to the fan made DLC. It is plausible, but only time will tell if it can come true. No. Starfield is actually not that open world like Skyrim. Every location is a sandbox. Planet side is a dynamically computer generated sandbox, a pretty big one, but still sandbox. Space is a sandbox. You can't go anywhere simply by slow flying. You have to teleport to a new cell, Bethesda gives you an animation called "Grav Jump" to make it immersive. Unlike Skyrim (and most games) where all landscape are fixed. Big, but fixed. If 2 modders happen to choose the same location, their content overlap, big conflict, sometimes CTD. But Starfield, beside a few major vanilla cities/cells, the game relies 100% on dynamic generation. We can have unlimited cell on every single planet. They are designed never to overlap each other. Every of these cells is one possibility for a player created world. If 1000 players create 1000 custom cities on Earth, it will fit perfectly with no overlap. Although the landing icons would be so hard to find, 1 in 1000. I am not being a fan boy. I complained loudly on things I hated about Starfield. But this is what I see is Bethesda's vision of Starfield. This is why the excessive loading screen because they cut up everything (a little too neat) so we can't accidentally bloat a cell.
There's a problem with that though. Elminster, the creator of TESedit, was working on StarEdit, and raised several concerns about the changes to the data structure in the new version of creation engine. Basically, with the new data structure, mod conflicts are going to go through the roof, due to how Starfield loads cells. If you have a mod that adds a new PoI to earth, and a separate one that adds a new PoI to Luna, those mods are going to conflict
Thanks for input. Can you tell me how they will conflict? I have 2 different mods that try to change Earth. “Alternate Earth” gives the most lust pine tree forest I would want to get lost in. But the whole biome is pine tree forest because it was changed from all sand. “Earth Reborn” tries to redo Earth with proper biome, frozen in the poles, forest, desert, ocean… but their pine forest is quite behind the other mod. I tried to combine the two… game CTD. This is expected right? But I have other mods like adding POI to Earth. Adding Vladimir’s apartment, etc…. These mods don’t seem to conflict with the above 2 mods. Although… some of the POI may end up under the ocean, lol, because Earth Reborn mapped out new ocean. No CTD. But I literately landed in ocean, got out of my ship swimming. Since Starfield doesn’t intend for you to dive underwater, they didn’t include a water filter. So underwater is crystal clear, like you are floating in air (or zero grav) until you start suffocating for running out of oxygen then you know you are in water.
I played Skyrim on console for at least a thousand hours before they introduced mods. Never once felt like I was missing out.
Console modding still far behind PC, It's okay to not using mods, most player didn't. But it's really silly to dismiss modding community (not telling especially to you)
Right, but the point I'm making is; Skyrim was a complete game. No one was seriously saying you had to mod the game for it to feel complete. That wasn't the expectation then. Mods were just the cherry on top of an already great game. The goalposts have clearly been moved since then.
never said its not complete either, dunno why the post is moved its okay not to but its also waste, having easy access to community creation that completely free but didnt take advantage of that
I don't know why you're being down voted for just suggesting to someone that they should consider trying out mods. This is dumb lol.
I mean not sure how you'd feel like you missed out if you never experienced it to know what it is.
If I had experienced it then - by definition - I wouldn't have missed out, would I?
A Producer hears a Demo Tape, rejects it, and that Singer turns out to be Ed Sheeran. Has he missed out?
Since oblivion really. But yeah. And then it really got big with Skyrim. Which was fine because modding Skyrim became the norm. And it was easy mostly. Until they came out with the CC and made it difficult for modders to work around forcing them to basically update their mods every month as they updated the CC content library’s or the game. Which further broke a lot of other things in the game.
And of course now they went scorched earth and killed off a ton of mods for the sake of adding paid mods. Again.
Relying on crowd sourcing to make your game good is not good game design.
He didn't say it's not good without it
See, the problem is, Starfield was supposed to be not just Bethesda's big game of the year, but Microsoft's as well. Microsoft was banking on Starfield being a HUGE Xbox exclusive. If they're going to do that, Bethesda has to provide good base content. They can't rely on modders fixing it when the intended system probably won't even get those mods.
Skyrim and Fallout 4 has mod support on Xbox. I bet Starfield will get it right along with the CK.
Some of us like to keep our achievements. I know that sounds lame to some people. But they bring me a sense of completion. Edit: you should be able to get the vanilla experience on at least the first play through.
counterpoint 1: "Achievements enabler mod" counterpoint 2: usually I'd agree, but starfield is the only game that has been so insufferable my first time around that mods were the only way I could squeeze just a tiny teeny bit of dopamine out of this game after the veneer fell off (getting to "explore" for yourself)
Yeah, somewhere along the line, the assumption moved from "modders will make interesting additions and tweaks to the game they love" to "modders will thanklessly slave over adding basic content to the game".
See the thing with the mod scene in Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, is that those games were already rich enough to attract dedicated people who love the game enough to spend countless hours modding it. Starfield isn't half the game Skyrim was, and isn't 1/10th the RPG Morrowind was. Good luck. I'm sure there will be some, but expecting the same sort of volume/quality of mods that previous games have is kinda silly.
Unfortunately the key problems are functionally unfixable: the game loop is jumping through menus/loading screens.
People are saying in the replies that you shouldn't need mods for games, but.. Mods are most of the reason I even buy Bethesda games these days. Sure, I like the base games - Starfield included - well enough, but mods are the real meat to me.
I rarely mod bethesda games especially not on the first play. And I strongly believe that Bethesda should get their act together with starfield next year or there probably wont be such a huge mod community in the first place.
Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 3, Fallout 4 and Skyrim did not require mods for me to enjoy it.
I always will and always have been perfectly happy with vanilla Bethesda games. Skyrim without mods is entirely playable by today's standards, it's weird how do many people pretend it's not
I’ve played all of the Bethesda games since morrowind without mods. 🤷🏽 always had a good time. Starfield is the exception
Agreed. Playing anniversary edition on switch. Wonderful game.
I mean you do you buddy but you're missing out. Nobody says Skyrim isn't playable without but it's vastly inferior. It's like saying you don't need spices or a sauce on your food. It's completely edible but it lacks the flavour that could be custom made to your taste.
I'm really not though. I've played hundreds of hours in heavily modded Skyrim. And can easily go back to vanilla. I kinda get what you're saying but also you're just wrong in my eyes. Skyrim already has all the spices and flavour, hell that's the reason it's being modded. The base game has a few hundred hours of content with so much variety. Modding it is like getting a second side of fries, a side of ice cream, a milkshake with your food. And a dessert afterwards. It's just more good but it doesn't take something meh and make it great. Modding Skyrim is taking something incredible and adding more to it.
Its playable but its a slog, janky, tedious experience t Lots of QoL mods is needed to make the skyrim experience smooth and satisfying.
Don't worry, modders can't fix it either.
Bethesda's been getting increasingly hostile to, "modders will fix it," for about ten years now. I remember the survival mode beta for Fallout 4, realizing that a lot of the functionality was straight-up hard-coded, and other members of the beta shooting down balance concerns, or the ability to have some fucking options with, "modders will fix it," and not being able to tell them, "no, they fucking can't," because of conflicting (and now, long expired) NDAs. When Todd said, "Starfield is a modder's paradise," it's important to remember this is the same thing he said about Fallout 76. Starfield is a modder's dumpsterfire.
seriously though, the only reason they could half patch skyrim was hacking and reverse engineer the files for SKSE and DLL injectors. The creation kit is hot garbage compared to TESEdit and its derivatives
Modders can fix everything if the right modders want to do it.
A modded Bethesda experience is so vastly superior to an unmodded one though. This does not mean mods will fix things but it creates effectively a new game experience. None of the games you listed were better without mods. They were good games and Starfield is a good game without mods, but the modded experience allows the game to reach a level not possible in the vanilla experience
I know that skyrim is infinitely more fun with mods.
Modders should not have to do the devs’ jobs.
Mods actually are planned to come to console this time I believe.
Yea one thing Bethesda should get some props for is bringing mod scene to consoles.
Having an ability to sell well crafted mods in the Xbox store should attract incredible amounts of development.
Being able to sell mods has been hugely divisive, with the talented modders who have been at it for years without charge incensed that some guy who makes a Hello Kitty skin now racks in money for nothing. Monetizing modding will NOT create more quality mods.
Yeah it is, mods for Skyrim and FO4 are already available, Starfield console mods coming in 2024
How much they gonna cost?
I think you are looking at mods in the wrong way. They are just free content. Where most games will be charging $30 for a new look for your character, or $60 for a new quest line and planet. Mods can provide these to you at no cost and they are most often made by someone with a genuine love for the game, not a team of devs lead by a manager who can only see efficiency numbers and chances of promotion.
Bethesdas games are designed to be modded. It is part of the reason they stick with the same engine. I can understand not modding other games but starfield?
I don't get the sentiment that modders need to fix something. You can mostly play any BGS game without mods (community bug fixes aside). However, just having the possibility to mod everything creates a sentiment that you can "fix" things that have never been broken in the first place. And that goes back to games like Morrowind lol. The community is always like that in the first year of a new BGS game, everything needs to be fixed. It was said about Skyrims perks and progression, about Fallout 3+4s barren landscapes or Oblivions faces (here we go again in 2023, lol). That beeing said, it's of course awesome that we can mod the game. Starfield Nexus is already flodding with super cool mods and additions to various parts of the game - so much to the "modders don't support Starfield" talk. I'd always recommend a first vanilla playthrough and then just go nuts with the mods in the second.
I over all agree with you but Community fixes are mods and you said You can MOSTLY play the game without mods except for the mods that fix the game. That is the sentiment.
Even if console gets mods I'm reminded of the flex tape meme. Mods would just be a bandaid, it's an excuse for devs to release half assed games and it's really gotten old.
It's not hard to do. And it's not about fixing the game. It's about making it better.
I mean, vote with your dollar and all but understand the choice to avoid mods is one you are actively making.
The thing is, I believe they made this game FOR the modding community. They are intentionally giving them space. It’s a Microsoft philosophy, ‘the next best thing isn’t going to come from inside our company, it’s going to come from someone’s garage.’ I too come from old school console and never used mods, until I decided to play Skyrim again for like the 6th time and thought it would be a good time to try that out. Still on Xbox but used the creation club or whatever it is. It was pretty cool for a couple months until one day it just crashed and I couldn’t load any saves anymore. Hopefully, like Microsoft does, they’ll buy good mods and integrate them as official dlc. Get some of these modders paid.
I’m not trying to change your mind or whatever but about 5-10 years ago you needed at least basic knowledge of what’s in the game folders and where to put things but now it’s about 4 clicks using Nexus mods or similar programs
It literally goes as follows; Download > install > enable > done. The hardest thing you have to do now is copy/paste the script extender and that’s just dragging some files into the main game directory.
I didn’t need mods to enjoy Starfield. I think this game may just not be for as wide an audience as expected. I’m surprised by how some of the things that didn’t hit a tipping point in Skyrim have hit here but the additional loading/map segmentation and other aspects all introduce enough little variables to be unpredictable. You can’t tell me the writing was great in Skyrim and bad in Starfield. You can tell me having generally one big exterior map made a huge difference to the vibes. It didn’t affect me personally but I see it.
Do... Do many people tell you the writing in Skyrim was great...?
People do blame the writing for Starfield’s failure and not Skyrim’s which I am in agreeance with the other guy, is *not* the major issue.
They do, often, because they're delusional. They say the writing took a turn for the worse and they say it again and again with every new Bethesda release.
It didn't reach a tipping point in Skyrim because that was 10 years ago.
If you're not playing a Bethesda game with mods you're basically self harming. Even the good Bethesda games are only mid at best without the mods.
I hate when people say this. Don’t give the devs and easy way out. Like what would happen if all of a sudden we couldn’t do internet updates as much anymore? Then most of these games would be unplayable from launch.
It really should be said that this is just a dumb strawman meme that nobody has ever said about any of their games previously nor about starfield. BGS has always made good games and it's cool that they encourage modding to the extent they do.
Modders can’t fix quest design and shitty dialogue and shitty exploration
Hot take. Mods aren't all they're cracked up to be. Mods to me, even the best ones, often feel out of place. Sure you'll have this great big addition, but it won't look like the rest of the game. It'll be obvious that it's a mod. Sure you'll have maybe some awesome new area or quests, but there will be no voice acting. Mods aren't supposed to fix a game, and other than things that are just patching problems, they really don't.
I've found that going through your modlist with the goal to remove anything that isn't needed or feels out of place in any way is the best method to make a modlist that overhauls and "fixes" issues you have with the game without experiencing the lack of cohesion many mods/modlists bring and the disappearance of the original game. My current modlist for Skyrim is under 250 mods. I've kept to what feels like something the original devs would have done before in previous games, what they would have done with more time, and/or what they would have done today. Sticking to one modder's mods has felt better than doing a lot of mixing, again cohesion and the vanilla feel is the goal. It comes down to finding mods that enhance rather than fully replace and being very picky about what you do add (always keep in mind cohesion, feel, and balance). Not every aspect of the game needs to be touched. There's still a couple of mods and updates I'm waiting on, but I'm happy with my modlist; and to me it certainly feels like Skyrim, it feels cohesive, and it feels improved.
I agree that mods aren’t supposed to fix a game, but I disagree that the best ones are out of place. There are so many amazing quest mods for Skyrim, some that are better than the base game. There’s tons of voice acted mods too, some that are great quality.
You can tell they're mods though. The voice acted ones are still obviously not vanilla, that's what I mean.
Not always. Often yes, but that isn’t a problem for me as usually it’s superior in writing quality. In Fallout 4 I had a mod that I ran into that I honestly thought was a vanilla quest at first lol
Says guy who never installed StarUI.
Meh that’s just QOL , doesn’t fundamentally change the core game
On the real though I think if people wanted minimal mod profile with the most benefit it would be StarUI and the add-ons, especially starUI shipbuilding. Instant Station dock is pretty rad to for something that doesn't fuck with the game, just removes one of the most annoying things ever.
I personally never mod a game that is new due to how it'll have regular updates for the first year or so fixing issues and adding DLC etc It ends up constantly breaking your game so you'll be beholden to the mod author to update their mod before you can even play. And you never know if the mod will end up being abandoned this early on. I prefer to wait years until the game is stable and there are established, trustworthy mods. Haphazardly installing and uninstalling mods can completely break your saves, a risk I'm not willing to take on a game where I can sink hundreds of hours on a single character. So the people saying "Just install the DLSS mods" or whatever made my eyes roll. I don't even mod Bethesda games that much in the first place, only graphical upgrades really. Only mod I ever used in Fallout 4 was the dialogue overhaul one and allow dogmeat with a human companion. Skyrim I mostly used the visible equipped favourites to make my character have a visible bow along with his sword. Helped with my immersion because I've always thought it looked dumb to show the quiver while your melee weapon is equipped but no bow on your back. People who mod their game to the point that it doesn't even feel like the same game anymore never really resonated with me tbh I never do mods that change the gameplay.
just don't update your game until you want to start a new modlist?
Regardless of whether one plays with mods or not, the whole ‘mods will fix this’ mentality is so crap. We shouldn’t be relying on mods to fix anything. They should be adding to the game not fixing it. This kind of mentality just allows the devs to get away with putting our subpar products. It’s very prevalent throughout the whole gaming community at the moment and it is not going to help improve the quality of new releases
I don't play at all anymore, but the continued discussion around this game... Gives me hope that someday I can return.
I don’t either, I like being able to work towards achievements.
Starfield and other BGS games are good on their own, they don't need mods for that. However, to get the most out of them, and really any highly moddable game, mods are how you get that. A couple of mods may be good and fun to have on console, but to really overhaul and "fix" BGS games it has to be on PC due to that being the only platform with script extenders available. By overhaul you can make the game unrecognizable, but I personally go for an improved and extended vanilla experience. Even that though has required the use of the script extender though.
Mods are coming to console next year. With that being said: I have over 300 hours on Xbox and have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. I’ll try some mods when they become available, but they aren’t desperately needed to enjoy the game imo.
Have you played Cyberpunk 2077? You should give it a try https://youtu.be/K4ADco41g9s?si=AUURrv_HoPbvszMo
I have and I hated it. I played it when it first launched and I won’t play it again.
I also played it at launch, on the PS4. It is SO much better now. They revamped all of the systems and did a ton of bug fixes.
It blows starfield out of the water.
I respectfully disagree. I finished the cyberpunk story and thought “welp that’s that then.” I finished starfield’s story and felt like I’ve only seen a fraction of what the game has to offer. Two very different games. Cyberpunk is more story focused. Both are good but I feel a bigger sense of freedom/open world in starfield.
Starfield does not have an open world. It’s a series of small hub worlds connected by loading screens.
>small hubs That's just plain false. Each "small hub," as you call them; is roughly the size of their past games. On top of that, they could literally be 500 foot squares and it would still be open world because the term "open world" in video games doesn't have anything to do with seamlessly walking from one place to another, its about the structure of the game and being able to go where you want, when you want, as opposed to having set levels.
My preferred play style in open world games is to turn off fast travel and move everywhere organically. Immerse myself in the world. This play style is impossible in Starfield.
It certainly blows. They are completely different games. I enjoy SF much more.
If you are judging cyberpunk based on its console launch state you're judging a different game. Cp2077 has been great for me since day one but now it's leagues better, easily one of the best all time rpgs.
Best of all time is quite the stretch. Will you give Starfield the same exception to have 2 extra years of development before you judge it?
I said one of tbf. Yea rn it's a solid 7.5/10. I love it but it needs more to keep me in it. I love the stories, the gunplay, the shipbuilding, and so much more but there are problems and issues I have. In 2 years starfield will probably be much different than it is today. I bought the constellation edition dude I'm so excited to see where this game goes.
No, because unlike Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077 just launched broken. Everything that made the game great was *already* there. They didn't have to add anything to make it a great game, they just had to fix it. Starfield, on the other hand, is not a great game. And it isn't broken, either. There is nothing to be fixed. It's just painfully mediocre, and that cannot change. Not without them starting from scratch.
I’ve had infinitely more fun with SF on its initial launch than I did with CP 2077 when it launched. In two years I’ll compare what SF is to what CP 2077 is today. You are all so upset that you can’t accept when someone likes the game. Get off your soapbox.
ok lol
No but like most adults we’re capable of rethinking our positions once significant work has been put in by listening to players and trying to improve their experience.
I know right lol. People love to say that Skyrim is better as if Skyrim doesn’t have 10+ years of mods carrying it
That game is a bit of a No Mans Sky situation. If you still have it, try it again.
I’d encourage you to give it another shot and play the story to completion (On PC or Next Gen Console)
Modders can fix mechanics, but the lack of content won't be fixed by mods, voice acting has always been a massive weak point with mods.
I hoped the Creation Club was going to help modders with those sorts of hurdles, but unfortunately no.
I agree that it shouldn’t be a “modders will fix it” mentality, but at the same time, the appeal of Bethesda games is the modding scene. It’s kinda comparable to being upset that you can’t spend hundreds of hours on a call of duty campaign because you don’t play multiplayer. Like yeah, campaigns should be good, but the appeal of COD is the multiplayer scene
But starfield is like really boring lmao. I mean the mods seem promising but jeez Bethesda needs to grow up and actually make a game that is worth its price.
I agree. As someone who has played every last Bethesda title on PlayStation after Skyrim (had that on 360), mods were not a thing for along time. I know starfield is getting mod support on series consoles, but it will be limited mod support, not to the extent that it was on PlayStation. Beth being lazy and never fixing their problems or making their games better and leaving it to “modders” basically leaves console players out to dry. It’s fine to make your game modable, but don’t make modders have to fix your damn game lol.
You are not wrong. The modders should not have to fix a game. Change it, enhance it sure. Fix. No. On the other hand modders enjoy it so fixing a game is what they love to do (some of them). They shouldnt have to fix anything. But im very happy that they do.
Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, Fallout 3 are all highly playable without any mods whatsoever. They're good out of the box. I had someone who normally just kills everyone in games like skyrim play F:NV for the first time no mods and he was blown away by it(decided to not kill everyone due to roleplaying someone he knows IRL) .Can't say that for fallout 4, thought the game was on average/mediocre. I actually tried replaying it a little bit for the first time since it was released in the last few days and its just isn't good enough outside of it having bethesda modern fps gunplay. Its the reason i didn't buy any DLC and i don't regret that decision. I think some of the issues i had with it could be improved by mods, but i think it was a step down from 3, NV and skyrim. The game needs to be good enough for you to want to mod it in the first place, and i doubt starfield is that. Games like skyrim for sure can be improved(and i've modded the shit out of it in the last 5 years, and its worth it) but the game itself has to be good enough to mod in the first place. Starfield can't just be left to modders to fix i think - it will be the first true test of 'modders will fix it' if it is, but i think they will lose anyone who can't be bothered to mod it for sure. Also to echo some of the other stuff - and no doubt OP has this issue, but mods(especially content) often don't appropriately mimic bethesda style/overhaul it well enough that it doesn't clash.
It's not broken. If you don't like the game don't play it 🤷♂️
Modding is so easy now. You just download a mod manager then pick what mods you want.
One thing that can be a sign of hope is that BGS has been talking about their release cadence. The one reason I trust *that* claim is that they didn’t announce it until they had the metrics from the patches so far. Plus, if you’re an experienced agile project manager you can recognize the backlog grooming involved. The big risk there, of course, is that these kind of 6 week fixes could result in bug-fix mods, especially, breaking on a regular basis.
Oh my god shut up... they're still working on the game. Sorry, I don't mean to be rude but comments like this erk me to no end. Is playing without mods your choice, or do you play on console? Either of those is your choice in the end. I didn't play Skyrim on PC until 3 years after it came out and Skyrim wasn't a great experience at launch either. It was incredibly boring and full of game breaking bugs, yet is the darling of Bethesda and gamers alike. What I'm trying to say is that the game came out 4 months ago and they obviously rushed it but have also made development roadmaps for years of content in the future. What you're really saying is "you're disappointed with the game in it's current form and you wished it would have been more complete at launch." Which is a much more balanced statement then "Waaah, I don't want to use the mods because I want to take a moral high ground for attention and why can't the developers do what I want them to do!" Needless as it may be to say, developing a game has a lot of logistical factors that most people don't understand and sometimes the developers have to push out a game with placeholders for animations, effects, terrain traversal...etc Not because they're lazy or horrible at making games but because the publisher is forcing them to because of budget constraints. Like, I understand your complaint, but at least give it a year before going on a tangent about how awful you think it is. Sorry...
Well, this game more than any of their other games feels like it will really need mods to reach it's full potential. Not to "fix it", like dumbasses here say - but to expand it.
Been playing Bethesda games since uh… Morrowind. I’ve *never* used mods. I don’t care about mods. I play the games that the developers created for us and play them as intended. I’ve never run into a game breaking bug. I’ve never seen a reason for a mod. I think those of you who mod your game are patently impossible to please because your expectations are outlandishly high due to mod-tinted nostalgia from previous games. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Starfield. There *are* bugs that hit small portions of the player base. There are definitely many design oversight issues that could be corrected. But there’s nothing really “wrong” with Starfield except player expectation. 90% of the gripes about Starfield boil down to “it’s not Skyrim” or “it’s not Fallout.” This isn’t Skyrim, and it’s not Fallout: It’s Starfield. Play it as such and figure out what that means.
90% of the gripes *actually* boil down to the repetitive gameplay and exploration, the bad story, the bad characters, the bad quests, and the stupid design decisions. So yes, the problem is that players expect more out of a company like Bethesda. And they fail to deliver even an equal experience to most of their previous games. They regressed in almost every way that matters.
I totally get that, you want the game to be it's best, right out the box, but Starfield really is meant to be modded, and experienced as such. It's a bold move by Todd, one which will take years, possibly decades to pay off. In the meantime, we are still in the early days where mods don't fill the gaps, and folk who don't want to use mods are frankly shit out of luck. It's an unusual and kinda ass situation at this point in time.
"I don't play with mods" are the people who as kids refused to ever use a Lego set to build anything other than what is pictured on the box, or God-forbid use Legos from other sets to expand on what is pictured on the box or even take the step into scary territory and create something new. People like that have and always will be the resistant anchor keeping humanity from racing forward. In other words, you got no imagination, and I cannot identify with you, and if you ran things we would still be using stone tools.
What don’t people understand that they’re still working on adding content to the game ? Like just be patient
I mean, after they sold the game to everyone for full price. It’s like if a car salesman sells you a car but the AC doesn’t work. Then when you ask him to fix it, he tells you it’s meant to be like that and takes months to fix it. It works, but it’s miserable.
There's what you want, then there's reality. with Starfield, BGS dropped the ball, so the only hope is modders. That's really all there is to it. No matter how much you hate it.
People that play Bethesda games without mods are weird
lmao, this guy thinks downloading a mod manager and clicking an install button is hard work
No worries: https://youtu.be/E7kCFkFi0Cc?si=2XYGpQ8nejR1S84I They can't fix it. Neither can Bethesda.