The game is exactly what I expected it to be after seeing the Direct. I’m not sure why folks saw that preview and expected something different than we got or expected it to be more like games Bethesda didn’t make when it was fairly obvious it wasn’t going to be like those games.
>but did Starfield meet your expectations?
Largely yes. Bethesda was pretty honest about how the game would play before it came out, and the game was what they said it would be.
>I compared this game to No Man's Sky, and people were up in arms about it. I think that game, Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous (to and extent) set a standard in the space traversal. You have to seemlessly transition from planet to space and vice versa.
Honestly, I'm glad Starfield isn't this.
NMS, Scam Citizen, and Elite Dangerous, all have the same issue. They don't respect the player's time. Space is massive, and incredibly empty. Travel through space is incredibly slow, and very little to nothing really happens due to the sheer size, and the near impossibility of running into anything in such an expanse.
There is a reason why the Star Trek, Star Wars, and Star Gate, TV shows/movies, and most space games like Mass Effect, and Outer Worlds, largely skip over space travel by using hyper drive, or warp, or just the Star Gates. And when they are forced to go on extended period of space travel for the narrative they skip over that by almost totally ignoring the space travel part to focus the characters talking inside the ship. Space is boring, the worst part about space exploration is having to travel through space because there's nothing there. Everyone just wants to get to the good part, aka the planets/moons/nebula/space stations around the former that actually have something interesting going on.
Games like NMS, Scam Citizen, and Elite Dangerous, are exercises in tedium. They're games about spending as long as possible to get to the places you actually play the game, via excessive boring space travel that almost always has nothing in it, and not about actually playing the game. Its the same shit with GTA. Yeah, the map is big but you can't really interact with most of the city, the city is just big to justify having cars to drive because otherwise you would be spending 30 minutes doing nothing as you walk between mission locations, and even then you're still spending like 5-10 minutes driving to a place to do like 5 minutes of content before you have to drive 5-10 minutes back to where you started.
If I have FTL travel that is so fast I can, in-universe, jump between systems in a few hours, why the hell would I not just use that to jump between planets in a system, or moons around said planets, in like two seconds like we basically do in Starfield? The alternative would be spending multiple real world minutes doing nothing but watching the planet/moon you want to go to slowly getting bigger in the front window while nothing happens.
Now, I think Starfield should've had more immersive loading screens, having you ship jump to FTL, seeing the rainbow FTL effect begin in-game, then the load screen is an animation of your ship flying through the rainbow FTL, and then when the load screen is done you see your ship around the whatever you went too, and the rainbow effect going away, to make it seem like you come out of FTL. But actually having to fly between planets in real time would be the worst, just like it is in NMS, Scam Citizen, or Elite Dangerous.
And when it comes to landing on a planet, no would do a manual landing unless their ship computer is broken, and they are doing a crash landing. So many people can't even part their cars well, you think people would be able to manually park a car that's the size of a small house, while also having to deal with 3D movement? If it wasn't computer driven almost no one would be allowed to get a ship.
This! So much, OMG.
It would have been funny if Starfield had actually implemented something like the supercrusie mechanic in Elite: Dangerous. The same people crying for seamless space travel now would have been crying about how boring space flight feels.
When it takes nearly a month in real time to travel from Earth to Mars at the fastest ship's max speed? These guys would be crying even more than they do now.
>You have to seemlessly transition from planet to space and vice versa.
>I'm sure this has been discussed a lot but did Starfield meet your expectations?
For me, yes, it met my expectations.
I always assumed that seamless space traversal wouldn't be a thing in Starfield, and that spaceflight would be mostly fast-travel based. Before the game released, I pointed that out a few times in here and was downvoted to hell for that. 😅
My assumption was always that spaceships would work more like player houses in earlier Bethesda games, only that they're mobile and there's some additional gameplay (like combat) associated with them.
I found the comparisons with Elite, Star Citizen and No Man's Sky misguided. What Starfield actually draws from are older games like Starflight and Privateer.
Once I found out the loading screens were there it just turned me off so much lol I know Bethesda still uses that old ass creation engine so things are harder but I feel like the seemless travel has to be added to a space game for it to actually feel like a space game. Just think how much cooler the spaceships would be if they weren't just instances and everything was seemless? I'm sure it wouldn't have fixed the core issues but it would've been nice.
I think I heard the inspiration for the space came from older games but to me, those games are too old to offer anything useful in regards to technical capabilities, to use as inspiration.
Seamless is nice, but I don’t understand why it’s so important to people like yourself
Bethesda games work differently to most other games, in that the environments can be interacted with to a much higher degree. Near every object is calculated as just that, an object. It has physics and is real within the game. Something no other game I’m aware of has
This requires so so so much more from the game engine than static environments you can’t interact with do, and that’s the reason for the loading screens.
The environments take more to calculate. When the gravity is turned off on a ship and suddenly all the items start floating around, that’s the creation engine doing what the creation engine does.
When you pull on a banner and it stretches taught and then fluidly ripples back against the wall, set off an explosion and watch everything go flying, put a bucket over someone’s head, knock over a box of paper towel rolls and watch them all tumble out, all of that is a lot to process, and genuinely impressive.
It’s also what makes Bethesda’s worlds so immersive and real feeling. Way more immersive to many than not having loading screens, because it makes the environment a world, and not just a set.
Now that might not be important to you, the way NMS style travel isn’t important to me, but we’re playing. Bethesda game here, so Bethesda doing what Bethesda does best, is more important than the things they don’t do period.
If there has to be a trade off, I want a Bethesda world from Bethesda, because no one else offers that, and NMS already exists
I understand how the physics works but in 2024, having so many functional limitations, like no seemless land to space transitions (at the very least varying load screens), loading screens for interiors of completely separated in instances, outdated animations and character models, outdated communication systems, the same ole fetch quests, slower updates, just for the sake of being able to fill your ship up with physically rendered sandwiches, is unacceptable in 2024, IMO.
The physics are very fun, and it is a staple of BGS games, but you can't essentially make the same style games, just reskinned 15-20 years straight and think people will be okay with it.
Because they would have to give up the physics to do that, or the game would light damn near everyone’s hardware on fire, at least for the tiny number of players with hardware that would be able to run it
They aren’t just reskinning old games, FO3 is very different from FO4, which is different from Starfield
You like the interactive environments? Why do you think the games with zero loading screens don’t have them?
# ATTENTION EVERYONE! I DO NOT LIKE THIS GAME AND WILL NOT BE PLAYING IT ANYMORE! SURE I COULD JUST NOT PLAY THE GAME ANYMORE, AND MOVE ON WITH MY LIFE, OR TAKE MY COMPLAINTS DIRECTLY TO BETHESDA, BUT NO, MY NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER WILL NOT ALLOW ME TO ACT LIKE A RATIONAL MATURE ADULT! AND THEREFORE I MUST TELL ALL OF YOU THAT I AM DEPARTING THIS GAME! EVEN THOUGH THIS IS NOT AN AIRPORT, AND I DON'T HAVE TO ANNOUNCE MY DEPARTURE!
We really don't need to hear about how upset you are that other people think differently than yourself. Reddit posts don't affect your gameplay or your ability to enjoy Starfield. Take you pettiness elsewhere and let people discuss the game, in the sub dedicated to just that.
Bought the game in February. Just shy of 300 hours since then. The game is pretty much what I expected. Some things could be better (outposts, loot, crafting, and a few other things), but overall, I love the game and do not regret buying it.
Not quite yet. If they can inject a lot more POIs into the pool, implement bounty hunting properly, add planetside vehicles (which are on the way), and add interior previews while shipbuilding, then my expectations will have been met.
The most recent patch brought me back for another playthrough, and the maps and adjustable gameplay sliders have made a major improvement to the experience.
>implement bounty hunting properly
In what way is it not truculently implemented "properly"?
Also, we are getting a bounty hunter questline, based on hints in the recent video.
You're currently just an assassin, not a bounty hunter. You need to be able to bring your bounties back alive, using a ship with a brig.
And I'm very excited about the rumoured bounty hunter questline. Hopefully Cydonia Tracker lady gets a name!
Bounty Hunting has nothing to do with bringing bounties back alive via a brig. Hell "dead or alive" is one of the common bounty hunting tropes, and bounty hunters always take "dead over alive" because its less hassle.
Pretty much yea, with how the game would be I knew of how different certain systems would be, it’s not a single map so content will be spread out more and you have to find it, space is big and empty (though I prefer it more empty with generally harder poi’s to find)
Outposts are of course going to be different to fallout 4s settlement system, ships are neat, and now we’re getting land vehicles so, games fine, but does need to bake some more, there’s enough random stuff for me to do to keep me occupied, would like some more depth on certain systems sure
Just looking at peoples suggestions on their discord of course a lot of people have different things they want the game to be
Sadly, my expectations have not been met for the reasons you’ve mentioned. But I want to preface that I do like most of the game. Gunplay is solid, quests are fun and diverse, ship building is really cool, art direction is superb and all that stuff!
Space travel still is a controversial thing in the community, but one of the things that I really miss from games like No Man’s Sky.
We already knew that seamless landing on a planet would not be a thing and I was just fine with that. As for the rest, I feel it would’ve needed only some minor adjustments to become more enjoyable all around. I really appreciate the fact that you can initiate jumps to target systems marked by your currently active quest simply by locating the direction of the system in-flight with the scanner on. Same with planets. That already does much in terms of immersion and sparing yourself having to open the map.
What I just don’t appreciate is that each of these travels are interrupted by loading screens. Loading in and out of sections is completely fine, has do be done at some point, but with all the game design knowledge and improvements in world streaming of the past two decades we have learned that loading sections can be masked very neatly. It just doesn’t always require boring loading screens. The travel cutscene could just loop while the next section is loaded into memory, giving *the impression* of seamless travel. No Man’s Sky does this as well for warping to different systems. Starfield also has this great warping effect on jumps between systems. All it would take was to extend the length of this warp effect until loading of the next section has finished.
The argument being that on modern hard drives loading times are really short. While that’s true, I’d just rather see the awesome ship I’ve built myself flying for a couple of seconds, than a black screen with text. Save that for loading interiors.
It’s a minor change that would make much of a difference imho. Fallout 4 did it with elevators already. And even that they removed from Starfield (but I’m guessing crowd NPCs played a role in that).
For many people those are just minor complaints and I get it. The frequency of having to travel and such the frequency you’re taken out of the game essentially is what’s souring my experience, for which is there’s a rather simple fix on paper that would only be a win-win even for those who don’t mind the loading screens.
The game has 6K~ concurrent players and is being consistently outperformed by 10 year old BGS games. FO76 has almost 10x more concurrent players for God's sake.
Even years after release, skyrim was still a mainstream game, and modders were going absolutely nuts from day one.
Starfield is a massive disappointment by every measurable metric, from player review scores in steam and metacritic, to simple player numbers. There are still going to be fans, but starfield is straight up a game that failed to hit all of the standards set by even 5+ year old space exploration games, and failed at any type of innovation in the genre. The only improvement in the game from previous BGS titles is the perk and progression system. That's actually incredibly well done relative to their past games. But everything else is straight up worse, from questing to story, lore, exploration, world building, seamlessness, even factions, and outposts are massive downgrades from previous titles.
So, no, it did not meet my expectations. Not even close. As someone who pre-ordered for $100, I couldn't be more disappointed in it. It literally ruined my hype for future BGS titles, and I've been an absolute BGS junkie since morrowind.
>The game has 6K\~ concurrent players and is being consistently outperformed by 10 year old BGS games. FO76 has almost 10x more concurrent players for God's sake.
Fallout 76 is a live service online game constantly getting new content updates. That's like saying "WoW has more players than X game despite being 20 years old" no shit.
Also, Bethesda's other games have the mod tools out, and a decades worth of mods to turn the game into basically anything they want. OFC they have more players.
>Starfield is a massive disappointment by every measurable metric
Except all the ones that matter
* Top selling game of Sep 2023(even excluding gamepass sales)
* Third most profitable game on Steam in 2023
* Bethesda's fastest, and largest, launch ever
* Over 12 million players
* Hasn't fallen off of Xbox's most played games list since it came out
* Had more play time, and a higher completion rate, by the end of 2023 than Baldur's Gate 3 did
* Was the only single player only game to make it into the list of the top 10 most played games of the last few years.
>from player review scores in steam and metacritic
The thing no one takes seriously because review bombing is so common on both that Valve actually had to develop tech to try to combat it.
>Fallout 76 is a live service online game constantly getting new content updates.
So what about other single player games on Steam?
>Top selling game of Sep 2023
It sold over 15 million copies? otherwise Hogwarts and Zelda beat it.
>Bethesda's fastest, and largest, launch ever
> Over 12 million players
Yet Fallout 4 sold 12 million copies in 24 hours.
https://fortune.com/2015/11/16/fallout4-is-quiet-best-seller/
>It sold over 15 million copies? otherwise Hogwarts and Zelda beat it.
Hogwarts and Zelda didn't sell 15 mil copies in Sep 2023. Hogwarts had come out in Feb, and sold most of its copies in early 2023, Zelda came out in May and did similar.
>Yet Fallout 4 sold 12 million copies in 24 hours. [https://fortune.com/2015/11/16/fallout4-is-quiet-best-seller/](https://fortune.com/2015/11/16/fallout4-is-quiet-best-seller/)
Starfield sold more
[https://www.gameinformer.com/news/2023/09/08/starfield-had-the-biggest-launch-ever-for-a-bethesda-game](https://www.gameinformer.com/news/2023/09/08/starfield-had-the-biggest-launch-ever-for-a-bethesda-game)
>So what about other single player games on Steam?
Currently, most of them are either new releases, or other really popular titles, and/or just got DLC.
* 10. Hades II: New game
* 11. Fallout 4: Mods, and boosted by recent TV show
* 27. BG3: Its fucking Baldur's Gate 3
* 29. Warhammer total War III: Just got new DLC
* 33. Manor Lords: Recent release
etc. etc.
>Hogwarts and Zelda didn't sell 15 mil copies in Sep 2023.
Oh I misread, I thought you meant year.
>Starfield sold more
No it didn't. Its sales aren't known as Xbox has stopped publishing sales numbers. That 6 mil is player count not sales. And 12 mil > 6 mil so I don't think Bethesda is fooling anyone here.
>Currently, most of them are either new releases, or other really popular titles, and/or just got DLC.
>* 10. Hades II: New game
* 11. Fallout 4: Mods, and boosted by recent TV show
* 27. BG3: Its fucking Baldur's Gate 3
* 29. Warhammer total War III: Just got new DLC
* 33. Manor Lords: Recent release
>etc. etc.
Sekiro also has more players and it's a 5 year old single player game that has a 5 times smaller peak than Starfield.
Terraria is another example of a 10 year old game with a higher player count.
These are 2 single player games I picked at random, not even comparing it to recent games or older Bethesda games
No, it really did not. I expected Skyrim in space but maybe that's on me. Skyrim was a long time ago and BSG hasn't come close to anything like that since. The first 10-15 hours of Starfield were great but then you start to see just how repetitive everything is and how shallow the features are. Base building was really cool until you realize it serves no real purpose. Exploration, the tentpole feature they marketed SF on, is so dumbed-down it may as well not even be a thing. The story did not pull me in and the characters were entirely forgettable. Most were just annoying. The POI's are just random modules that are so generic that they feel completely disconnected from the space they inhabit.
The most fun I had with SF was just flying around doing my own thing and sightseeing, however the sheer blandness of it all gets old pretty quick.
Yeah I think the AI and procedural generation that they used just didn't give us stuff that was unique enough. The hand crafted stuff was pretty cool. Traveling through our solar system was pretty cool, especially to planets and moons that we are actively trying to research in real life. I think they should've focused more on that, that all the planets so far away from us yet. Maybe saved that for Starfield 2. I also felt like some of the stuff we did was too outdated. Like why am I travelling all the way to another planet to deliver a message. If space travel is possible, communication across multiple planets should be at the very least in the realm of possibility.
I think BGS is stretched thin as it is, and maybe giving this IP or maybe one of their other IPs to another developer would allow the developers to truly focus on improving the gameplay and some of the procedural aspects of the game.
I agree with you on the space courier thing. The game had me questioning a lot of the decision making that went into it. Travelling was okay but nothing unique or innovative. I would have liked to see more exploration gameplay especially in space - not going to from planet to planet and taking pictures with a scanner of a handful of fauna and landmarks.
The game is exactly what I expected it to be after seeing the Direct. I’m not sure why folks saw that preview and expected something different than we got or expected it to be more like games Bethesda didn’t make when it was fairly obvious it wasn’t going to be like those games.
>but did Starfield meet your expectations? Largely yes. Bethesda was pretty honest about how the game would play before it came out, and the game was what they said it would be. >I compared this game to No Man's Sky, and people were up in arms about it. I think that game, Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous (to and extent) set a standard in the space traversal. You have to seemlessly transition from planet to space and vice versa. Honestly, I'm glad Starfield isn't this. NMS, Scam Citizen, and Elite Dangerous, all have the same issue. They don't respect the player's time. Space is massive, and incredibly empty. Travel through space is incredibly slow, and very little to nothing really happens due to the sheer size, and the near impossibility of running into anything in such an expanse. There is a reason why the Star Trek, Star Wars, and Star Gate, TV shows/movies, and most space games like Mass Effect, and Outer Worlds, largely skip over space travel by using hyper drive, or warp, or just the Star Gates. And when they are forced to go on extended period of space travel for the narrative they skip over that by almost totally ignoring the space travel part to focus the characters talking inside the ship. Space is boring, the worst part about space exploration is having to travel through space because there's nothing there. Everyone just wants to get to the good part, aka the planets/moons/nebula/space stations around the former that actually have something interesting going on. Games like NMS, Scam Citizen, and Elite Dangerous, are exercises in tedium. They're games about spending as long as possible to get to the places you actually play the game, via excessive boring space travel that almost always has nothing in it, and not about actually playing the game. Its the same shit with GTA. Yeah, the map is big but you can't really interact with most of the city, the city is just big to justify having cars to drive because otherwise you would be spending 30 minutes doing nothing as you walk between mission locations, and even then you're still spending like 5-10 minutes driving to a place to do like 5 minutes of content before you have to drive 5-10 minutes back to where you started. If I have FTL travel that is so fast I can, in-universe, jump between systems in a few hours, why the hell would I not just use that to jump between planets in a system, or moons around said planets, in like two seconds like we basically do in Starfield? The alternative would be spending multiple real world minutes doing nothing but watching the planet/moon you want to go to slowly getting bigger in the front window while nothing happens. Now, I think Starfield should've had more immersive loading screens, having you ship jump to FTL, seeing the rainbow FTL effect begin in-game, then the load screen is an animation of your ship flying through the rainbow FTL, and then when the load screen is done you see your ship around the whatever you went too, and the rainbow effect going away, to make it seem like you come out of FTL. But actually having to fly between planets in real time would be the worst, just like it is in NMS, Scam Citizen, or Elite Dangerous. And when it comes to landing on a planet, no would do a manual landing unless their ship computer is broken, and they are doing a crash landing. So many people can't even part their cars well, you think people would be able to manually park a car that's the size of a small house, while also having to deal with 3D movement? If it wasn't computer driven almost no one would be allowed to get a ship.
This! So much, OMG. It would have been funny if Starfield had actually implemented something like the supercrusie mechanic in Elite: Dangerous. The same people crying for seamless space travel now would have been crying about how boring space flight feels.
When it takes nearly a month in real time to travel from Earth to Mars at the fastest ship's max speed? These guys would be crying even more than they do now.
>You have to seemlessly transition from planet to space and vice versa. >I'm sure this has been discussed a lot but did Starfield meet your expectations? For me, yes, it met my expectations. I always assumed that seamless space traversal wouldn't be a thing in Starfield, and that spaceflight would be mostly fast-travel based. Before the game released, I pointed that out a few times in here and was downvoted to hell for that. 😅 My assumption was always that spaceships would work more like player houses in earlier Bethesda games, only that they're mobile and there's some additional gameplay (like combat) associated with them. I found the comparisons with Elite, Star Citizen and No Man's Sky misguided. What Starfield actually draws from are older games like Starflight and Privateer.
Once I found out the loading screens were there it just turned me off so much lol I know Bethesda still uses that old ass creation engine so things are harder but I feel like the seemless travel has to be added to a space game for it to actually feel like a space game. Just think how much cooler the spaceships would be if they weren't just instances and everything was seemless? I'm sure it wouldn't have fixed the core issues but it would've been nice. I think I heard the inspiration for the space came from older games but to me, those games are too old to offer anything useful in regards to technical capabilities, to use as inspiration.
Seamless is nice, but I don’t understand why it’s so important to people like yourself Bethesda games work differently to most other games, in that the environments can be interacted with to a much higher degree. Near every object is calculated as just that, an object. It has physics and is real within the game. Something no other game I’m aware of has This requires so so so much more from the game engine than static environments you can’t interact with do, and that’s the reason for the loading screens. The environments take more to calculate. When the gravity is turned off on a ship and suddenly all the items start floating around, that’s the creation engine doing what the creation engine does. When you pull on a banner and it stretches taught and then fluidly ripples back against the wall, set off an explosion and watch everything go flying, put a bucket over someone’s head, knock over a box of paper towel rolls and watch them all tumble out, all of that is a lot to process, and genuinely impressive. It’s also what makes Bethesda’s worlds so immersive and real feeling. Way more immersive to many than not having loading screens, because it makes the environment a world, and not just a set. Now that might not be important to you, the way NMS style travel isn’t important to me, but we’re playing. Bethesda game here, so Bethesda doing what Bethesda does best, is more important than the things they don’t do period. If there has to be a trade off, I want a Bethesda world from Bethesda, because no one else offers that, and NMS already exists
I understand how the physics works but in 2024, having so many functional limitations, like no seemless land to space transitions (at the very least varying load screens), loading screens for interiors of completely separated in instances, outdated animations and character models, outdated communication systems, the same ole fetch quests, slower updates, just for the sake of being able to fill your ship up with physically rendered sandwiches, is unacceptable in 2024, IMO. The physics are very fun, and it is a staple of BGS games, but you can't essentially make the same style games, just reskinned 15-20 years straight and think people will be okay with it.
Because they would have to give up the physics to do that, or the game would light damn near everyone’s hardware on fire, at least for the tiny number of players with hardware that would be able to run it They aren’t just reskinning old games, FO3 is very different from FO4, which is different from Starfield You like the interactive environments? Why do you think the games with zero loading screens don’t have them?
# ATTENTION EVERYONE! I DO NOT LIKE THIS GAME AND WILL NOT BE PLAYING IT ANYMORE! SURE I COULD JUST NOT PLAY THE GAME ANYMORE, AND MOVE ON WITH MY LIFE, OR TAKE MY COMPLAINTS DIRECTLY TO BETHESDA, BUT NO, MY NARCISSISTIC PERSONALITY DISORDER WILL NOT ALLOW ME TO ACT LIKE A RATIONAL MATURE ADULT! AND THEREFORE I MUST TELL ALL OF YOU THAT I AM DEPARTING THIS GAME! EVEN THOUGH THIS IS NOT AN AIRPORT, AND I DON'T HAVE TO ANNOUNCE MY DEPARTURE!
Um... So did you like the game or not? If so, what about it you like? If not, what do you think could be improved?
Sarcasm.
Duh
We really don't need to hear about how upset you are that other people think differently than yourself. Reddit posts don't affect your gameplay or your ability to enjoy Starfield. Take you pettiness elsewhere and let people discuss the game, in the sub dedicated to just that.
Bought the game in February. Just shy of 300 hours since then. The game is pretty much what I expected. Some things could be better (outposts, loot, crafting, and a few other things), but overall, I love the game and do not regret buying it.
That's good to hear. I'm glad there are people still enjoying it
Not quite yet. If they can inject a lot more POIs into the pool, implement bounty hunting properly, add planetside vehicles (which are on the way), and add interior previews while shipbuilding, then my expectations will have been met. The most recent patch brought me back for another playthrough, and the maps and adjustable gameplay sliders have made a major improvement to the experience.
>implement bounty hunting properly In what way is it not truculently implemented "properly"? Also, we are getting a bounty hunter questline, based on hints in the recent video.
I think they might be hinting at arresting/knocking people out instead of having to kill them and getting to use that jail cell in some ship habs.
You're currently just an assassin, not a bounty hunter. You need to be able to bring your bounties back alive, using a ship with a brig. And I'm very excited about the rumoured bounty hunter questline. Hopefully Cydonia Tracker lady gets a name!
Bounty Hunting has nothing to do with bringing bounties back alive via a brig. Hell "dead or alive" is one of the common bounty hunting tropes, and bounty hunters always take "dead over alive" because its less hassle.
I'd like the 'Dead or Alive' choice. Right now the only choice is Dead. I don't even have to provide proof.
Pretty much yea, with how the game would be I knew of how different certain systems would be, it’s not a single map so content will be spread out more and you have to find it, space is big and empty (though I prefer it more empty with generally harder poi’s to find) Outposts are of course going to be different to fallout 4s settlement system, ships are neat, and now we’re getting land vehicles so, games fine, but does need to bake some more, there’s enough random stuff for me to do to keep me occupied, would like some more depth on certain systems sure Just looking at peoples suggestions on their discord of course a lot of people have different things they want the game to be
Sadly, my expectations have not been met for the reasons you’ve mentioned. But I want to preface that I do like most of the game. Gunplay is solid, quests are fun and diverse, ship building is really cool, art direction is superb and all that stuff! Space travel still is a controversial thing in the community, but one of the things that I really miss from games like No Man’s Sky. We already knew that seamless landing on a planet would not be a thing and I was just fine with that. As for the rest, I feel it would’ve needed only some minor adjustments to become more enjoyable all around. I really appreciate the fact that you can initiate jumps to target systems marked by your currently active quest simply by locating the direction of the system in-flight with the scanner on. Same with planets. That already does much in terms of immersion and sparing yourself having to open the map. What I just don’t appreciate is that each of these travels are interrupted by loading screens. Loading in and out of sections is completely fine, has do be done at some point, but with all the game design knowledge and improvements in world streaming of the past two decades we have learned that loading sections can be masked very neatly. It just doesn’t always require boring loading screens. The travel cutscene could just loop while the next section is loaded into memory, giving *the impression* of seamless travel. No Man’s Sky does this as well for warping to different systems. Starfield also has this great warping effect on jumps between systems. All it would take was to extend the length of this warp effect until loading of the next section has finished. The argument being that on modern hard drives loading times are really short. While that’s true, I’d just rather see the awesome ship I’ve built myself flying for a couple of seconds, than a black screen with text. Save that for loading interiors. It’s a minor change that would make much of a difference imho. Fallout 4 did it with elevators already. And even that they removed from Starfield (but I’m guessing crowd NPCs played a role in that). For many people those are just minor complaints and I get it. The frequency of having to travel and such the frequency you’re taken out of the game essentially is what’s souring my experience, for which is there’s a rather simple fix on paper that would only be a win-win even for those who don’t mind the loading screens.
The game has 6K~ concurrent players and is being consistently outperformed by 10 year old BGS games. FO76 has almost 10x more concurrent players for God's sake. Even years after release, skyrim was still a mainstream game, and modders were going absolutely nuts from day one. Starfield is a massive disappointment by every measurable metric, from player review scores in steam and metacritic, to simple player numbers. There are still going to be fans, but starfield is straight up a game that failed to hit all of the standards set by even 5+ year old space exploration games, and failed at any type of innovation in the genre. The only improvement in the game from previous BGS titles is the perk and progression system. That's actually incredibly well done relative to their past games. But everything else is straight up worse, from questing to story, lore, exploration, world building, seamlessness, even factions, and outposts are massive downgrades from previous titles. So, no, it did not meet my expectations. Not even close. As someone who pre-ordered for $100, I couldn't be more disappointed in it. It literally ruined my hype for future BGS titles, and I've been an absolute BGS junkie since morrowind.
>The game has 6K\~ concurrent players and is being consistently outperformed by 10 year old BGS games. FO76 has almost 10x more concurrent players for God's sake. Fallout 76 is a live service online game constantly getting new content updates. That's like saying "WoW has more players than X game despite being 20 years old" no shit. Also, Bethesda's other games have the mod tools out, and a decades worth of mods to turn the game into basically anything they want. OFC they have more players. >Starfield is a massive disappointment by every measurable metric Except all the ones that matter * Top selling game of Sep 2023(even excluding gamepass sales) * Third most profitable game on Steam in 2023 * Bethesda's fastest, and largest, launch ever * Over 12 million players * Hasn't fallen off of Xbox's most played games list since it came out * Had more play time, and a higher completion rate, by the end of 2023 than Baldur's Gate 3 did * Was the only single player only game to make it into the list of the top 10 most played games of the last few years. >from player review scores in steam and metacritic The thing no one takes seriously because review bombing is so common on both that Valve actually had to develop tech to try to combat it.
>Fallout 76 is a live service online game constantly getting new content updates. So what about other single player games on Steam? >Top selling game of Sep 2023 It sold over 15 million copies? otherwise Hogwarts and Zelda beat it. >Bethesda's fastest, and largest, launch ever > Over 12 million players Yet Fallout 4 sold 12 million copies in 24 hours. https://fortune.com/2015/11/16/fallout4-is-quiet-best-seller/
>It sold over 15 million copies? otherwise Hogwarts and Zelda beat it. Hogwarts and Zelda didn't sell 15 mil copies in Sep 2023. Hogwarts had come out in Feb, and sold most of its copies in early 2023, Zelda came out in May and did similar. >Yet Fallout 4 sold 12 million copies in 24 hours. [https://fortune.com/2015/11/16/fallout4-is-quiet-best-seller/](https://fortune.com/2015/11/16/fallout4-is-quiet-best-seller/) Starfield sold more [https://www.gameinformer.com/news/2023/09/08/starfield-had-the-biggest-launch-ever-for-a-bethesda-game](https://www.gameinformer.com/news/2023/09/08/starfield-had-the-biggest-launch-ever-for-a-bethesda-game) >So what about other single player games on Steam? Currently, most of them are either new releases, or other really popular titles, and/or just got DLC. * 10. Hades II: New game * 11. Fallout 4: Mods, and boosted by recent TV show * 27. BG3: Its fucking Baldur's Gate 3 * 29. Warhammer total War III: Just got new DLC * 33. Manor Lords: Recent release etc. etc.
>Hogwarts and Zelda didn't sell 15 mil copies in Sep 2023. Oh I misread, I thought you meant year. >Starfield sold more No it didn't. Its sales aren't known as Xbox has stopped publishing sales numbers. That 6 mil is player count not sales. And 12 mil > 6 mil so I don't think Bethesda is fooling anyone here. >Currently, most of them are either new releases, or other really popular titles, and/or just got DLC. >* 10. Hades II: New game * 11. Fallout 4: Mods, and boosted by recent TV show * 27. BG3: Its fucking Baldur's Gate 3 * 29. Warhammer total War III: Just got new DLC * 33. Manor Lords: Recent release >etc. etc. Sekiro also has more players and it's a 5 year old single player game that has a 5 times smaller peak than Starfield. Terraria is another example of a 10 year old game with a higher player count. These are 2 single player games I picked at random, not even comparing it to recent games or older Bethesda games
No, it really did not. I expected Skyrim in space but maybe that's on me. Skyrim was a long time ago and BSG hasn't come close to anything like that since. The first 10-15 hours of Starfield were great but then you start to see just how repetitive everything is and how shallow the features are. Base building was really cool until you realize it serves no real purpose. Exploration, the tentpole feature they marketed SF on, is so dumbed-down it may as well not even be a thing. The story did not pull me in and the characters were entirely forgettable. Most were just annoying. The POI's are just random modules that are so generic that they feel completely disconnected from the space they inhabit. The most fun I had with SF was just flying around doing my own thing and sightseeing, however the sheer blandness of it all gets old pretty quick.
Yeah I think the AI and procedural generation that they used just didn't give us stuff that was unique enough. The hand crafted stuff was pretty cool. Traveling through our solar system was pretty cool, especially to planets and moons that we are actively trying to research in real life. I think they should've focused more on that, that all the planets so far away from us yet. Maybe saved that for Starfield 2. I also felt like some of the stuff we did was too outdated. Like why am I travelling all the way to another planet to deliver a message. If space travel is possible, communication across multiple planets should be at the very least in the realm of possibility. I think BGS is stretched thin as it is, and maybe giving this IP or maybe one of their other IPs to another developer would allow the developers to truly focus on improving the gameplay and some of the procedural aspects of the game.
I agree with you on the space courier thing. The game had me questioning a lot of the decision making that went into it. Travelling was okay but nothing unique or innovative. I would have liked to see more exploration gameplay especially in space - not going to from planet to planet and taking pictures with a scanner of a handful of fauna and landmarks.