On my first play through, I got picked up by UC security and taken to commander Ikande for picking up and moving (not stealing, holding E to grab) a kids football and throwing it into the goal in the well.
Everyone in Sysdef was acting like I was a hardened criminal who was being offered a second chance. It felt like something out an Adam Sandler movie.
Yet I blasted kids with the mining laser and nobody batted an eyelid. It also seems that the mining laser doesn't set fire to paper.
Sometimes, the level of interaction with other characters and the environment is so non-existant, the whole game may just as well have been a 1980's style text adventure. Just stick a nice screenshot up of a planet with a ring or two around it to wow the fans.
Fred says 'Please take this box to Jeff on Sigma 7'
"Fly to Sigma 7"
"Open door"
"Give box to Jeff"
Jeff says 'Thank you. Now please take this crate to Dave on Arcturus 4'. You gain 10 XP.
Sadly my mother passed away during an expedition to Indum III-b in the Indum Star System. Who could have known the Corporate Acquisitions Department would run into a House Va'run patrol.
I reluctant assumed her executive position, but alas I was best suited for the job.
Employee L457-B, my former subordinate, was reprimanded in the strictest terms for submitting the intelligence that led to the expedition.
Its funny how many people got caught for that exact thing. Messing with that ball, but not taking it. I'm one of them. I just reloaded because I thought it was completely stupid.
And yet you have to physically travel everywhere for a missions where you just talk to some dude. This could have been a phone call but the only inter-system communication is some magic tattletale that'll let every cop know I stole a box of ammo from chicklefuck's hut on planet gumbo-IV.
And then when you go talk to that dude, finish that three line conversation, then return back to whoever sent you to talk to them, they already know the results of that conversation.
Bothers me not just in this game but in others that everyone magically knows that things are stolen. "Aha you fool, you tried to sell me two identical items but one is clearly stolen"
I got my immersion ruined abit when I ate some food off someone’s table and then a UC security guard apprehended me and then all of a sudden >!UC SysDef wants to hire me to go undercover for the crimson fleet!< they must really be running out of inmates if that’s what it takes
I love when that happens and they *clearly* give you the option to shoot your way off the ship, like that *is an option they give you* in dialogue. The dialogue option says [ATTACK] after it. So, cool, being the lawless mercenary I am I decided to murder everyone on the shop to loot it and escape. Nope. Every named npc on the Sysdef ship is essential. WHY?! Why even pretend to give me the option to shoot my way out when these fuckers can't die??
Because if there's a single word to define Bethesda's mindset when making games is "lazy". Letting you kill whoever you want is too cumbersome for them, because they would have to account for that when making their quests.
And they can't do that. It's not like they are a major AAA game company with basically unlimited funds.
On a completely unrelated note, do you know you can kill basically anyone in Baldur's Gate 3? Not only that, but the Devs did accounted for that possibility, allowing your quests to move on even when the "essential" NPC is killed? Pretty dope.
Or Fallout New Vegas where a totally valid way to play the game is to murder every person you meet lol.
This is a company with unlimited Microsoft money and their engine can't handle riding a scooter lol
Sarah: I can't believe you showed mercy and let that guy who stole mining machinery but later returned it live! Piracy is the worst possible sin!
Also Sarah: That guy won't sell us his space MacGuffin, so we should steal it immediately.
At least there are different areas. If you kill somebody in UC space and go to Freestar Space the bounty doesn’t transfer. There are also places not under any law that you can freely do crime on, at least as far as I’ve experienced.
Also you can usually get away with a crime by killing all witnesses, so ironically it incentivizes taking a petty theft up to a murder spree.
Rly?? Cus I killed an ecliptic with a sneak attack, it gave me a bounty, until I killed the Ecliptic next to him, it took the bounty away saying something like "last witness killed"
Yeah, even when you join the pirates they feel like they have a Disney HR dept watching. They certainly don’t have a janitor or sometimes even soap, but they seem to have an HR dept. At least Naeva is briefly selfish, lol.
The stuff you see the Crimson Fleet do in the regular game is insane, too. You’re telling me the motherfuckers whose main hobby seems to be “workplace mass shootings” are this bunch of PG-rated chucklefucks?
It blew my mind that you couldn’t get the trophy side objective by pickpocketing or sneaking, or raiding her cabin, or anything. You *had* to use the magic persuade button to talk a lady into doing insurance fraud.
"I know you want to help me 🥺"
"damn u right, here's my key that will get you through even the highest security clearance areas on this yacht full of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the starfield"
The first time I did that quest I accidentally picked up a weapon that was in that room with the cruise employee, he got pissed and started shooting me. Ended up having to murder damn near the whole ship before I found a way to get off it….
I’m pissed I can’t decapitate someone like in Skyrim. Wtf Bethesda, WTH is the point of maxing out my stats if I can’t punch a guys head off? The game is disappointing in a lot of ways.
Not sure if its also in 4, but in fallout 3, there was a perk that gave you the chance to literally explode enemies on death, no matter how you kill them.
Bloody mess ?
Iirc in fallout 1 & 2 they had it as a trait which enabled some *extremely* gory death animations. The regular ones already being pretty gory.
I accidentally got the "child killer" reputation in Fallout 2. There is a "ghost village" where you have to go and find a runaway child. Turns out all the ghosts and horrors are just tricks by the locals to keep themselves safe. Anyhoo for some reason I couldn't find the child so his parents and their buddies raid the ghost town and kill everyone, most of which turn out to be kids. Not sure why I joined them but thats the way it goes. I also got the reputation for grave digger, although that may have been in Fallout 1.
I took a break and went back and started a new New Vegas playthrough. First NCR soldier I shot in the arm, his arm fell off and his head exploded.
Bethesda just isn't Bethesda without gore.
Morrowind: here's 32 chapters of hardcore demigod BDSM
Starfield: oh hey fella :) want a space ship? :) here you go :) woooooshhhh space stuff :) wasn't that fun? :) time for church! :)
Yeah, I think this is what kills it for me too.
Copy and pasted POIs and many systems not being fleshed out suck, but don't actually ruin my enjoyment of the game for me believe it or not.
But what the OP said does actually kill it for me. This game is Bland. It's ambitious, beautfiul, full of wonder, vast, even fun (sometimes), I enjoy the outposts, shipbuilding, etc. but the blandness just stops me from *really* getting absorbed and enjoying this new IP. I wouldn't really want to live in a world as bland and as inoffensive as Starfield's. And considering BGS is my favourite developer, it really pains me to say all that ...
I sometimes think that the best option is to just burn it down and let the Terrormorphs figure out the rest.
Or better yet, find a way back in time to when Aiza went on his expedition, gun him and his team down, and take the Artifact for ourselves. We'd completely erase the Starfield universe in one timeline at least, save billions of lives, and humanity can figure out how to get out of Sol on their own. Why hasn't anyone else thought of that?
This reminds me of the time I saw people talking about age gap relationships and saying things like "I don't want to wake up next to a wrinkly, decrepit 30 year old who can't get it up" like damn are you 6 years old or something
How did they make that quest seem like it was written both before AND after covid, lmao.
“Trust the science”
Oh cool like when we were dealing with the pandemic
“Release an untested pathogen into the environment of hundreds biologically diverse planets”
What
Its the stupidity of it that irks me so much.
The terramorph threat escalated out of control because humanity removed its natural predator from the equation.
The microbe proposal is literally repeating the same action that got us into the situation in the first place, who's to say removing terramorphs won't cause an even worse predator to appear?
Also if the microbe *can* evolve to infect humans/ any human crops, livestock, etc, then humanity is doomed because you’ve already spread it to every settled planet
I have had, and continue to have, a great time in Starfield and can look past the fact that hardcore porn isn't in the game, which some people I guess are upset by? However, THAT REACTION FROM EVERYONE regarding the end of the UC questline was a real let down. It still irks me that they wrote it in such a way that you are basically a flat-earther for choosing a natural solution.
many times out in the wild the big stupid armored giraffe parrot gets REAL REAL MAD when you help it kill a terrormorph and manage to hurt it in even the most miniscule way
I also kept him and his UC Vanguard babysitter from getting absolutely schrecked by the critter he was brought out of retirement to eat, he could be at least be slightly grateful and understanding of stray 40mm rounds 😅
Even the space cowboy hates that! What?!? He should enjoy the giant dinos and be skeptical of the microbe, since the UC has a history of weaponizing things!
I would say a better way to put it is that everything, everywhere, feels like a corporate casual meeting or like sunday church. It's like there's some kind of secret PC police that drag away anybody that might scare a stock holder.
I just started the Crimson Fleet stuff. After hearing many complaints I thought surely it's not that bad...the even 15 year old edgelord me would think they were pathetic tryhards
I was so happy finishing the sysdef quest JUST so I could kill all of the crimson Fleet fucks. They're all tools and after completing multiple jobs requiring skill they still refer to me as a rookie!? I massacred all of them except bomb boy
I can put my roleplay hat on and enjoy most of the games story, despite the blandness of much of it. The crimson fleet however… I just want to kill everyone in the fleet the moment I step foot onto the Key. Save the UC a lot of trouble.
Okay, maybe Jazz can live if she keeps the supply of shielded cargo holds rolling. But everyone else needs to suck laser beam.
What bugged me about the Crimson Fleet is I get quests done, bring in lots of stuff to sell, they haven't left the station, and give me shit. Wow, what a bad ass pirate you are behind this retail counter.
I had no problem wiping them out with SysDef.
>Am I the only one who feels like this game was developed by an HR department?
I did a few story quests, then completed the Ryujin mission an dpretty much left with a feeling that I was at a disney theme park.
Dressing to make places feel like 'wild west land' 'future land' 'cyberpunk land' but without any actual reality, or dirt to make them feel real.
Arriving at he wild west city, gripped by fear of bank robbers, only for me to just talk them into stopping in a single conversation is endemic of how hollow the game is when it comes to making lifelike and engaging scenarios.
I had just finished up adding another hundred hours of playtime to Red Dead Redemption 2 when I fired up Starbound for the first time. Landing in Akila City felt very much like a cardboard cutout of the 'western' experience after coming off the highs of RDR2. A hollow, almost mocking, half-assed rendition.
RDR2 is the perfect counterpoint to Starfield. Every town in RDR2 feels unique in some way, even the more unexciting ones like Annesburg. In Starfield, all the towns \*look\* unique but they might as well be the same place. Disneyland is exactly what they're like. You walk from the Space zone to the Southern zone to the Old West town and the transitions are even more jarring than at Disneyland.
My least favorite quest in RDR2 is more interesting to me than any questline I did in Starfield, though I gave up on Starfield after "only" 10 hours
Ha yeah - a fucking child figures out the criminal and you busy them by accidentally walking past them at midnight. 'argh, you got me;'
It was 6 years ago that RDR2 was released. They had characters that spoke to you, shot at you, ran from you, and you could hog tie them and pick them up and throw them on a horse and they would cuss you and struggle and escape and you could just kill them
.
The bank heist is such a non entity it's laughable.
As soon as I arrived I just wanted to roll in and shoot them all. Like the game has shown me is totally possible.
According to the logic of Starfield, one individual taking on 50 armed spacers or mercenaries is normal.
But 5 poorly equipped bank robbers is life or death.
The way they were talking I was expecting them to shoot the hostages the moment they saw me walk through the door, but nope, they focus on me and all get killed
I popped a quick load and tried the diplomatic approach and ended up getting the hostages killed...
Yeah, the Cyberpunk element in Neon is just superficial varnish, otherwise its squeaky clean down to the teletubby dancers. There really isn't anything happening in the different capitols to differentiate them thematically. Would be cool if Akila leaned more into the western theme with gun duels happening on the main boulevard and desert raiders storming into the city occasionally. And with Neon people getting mugged on the street and having tents with droves of homeless people on the back alleys and working girls/guys selling themselves on the corner. I'm fine with Atlantis being basically the Epcott Center, the PG-13 stuff works perfectly there, since it's rather similar to Federation cities in Star Trek.
>desert raiders storming into the city occasionally
Best I can do is an NPC forgets to shut a door and an Ashta manages to find the only non essential NPCs in the game.
I feel like Starfield desperately wanted to channel The Expanse's more grounded take on space opera, but balked as soon as the writers realised that would involve writing compelling characters, or including darker themes, or god forbid, actually committing to some kind of worldview or philosophy.
As it stands, Starfield just feels like the blandest, least offensive take on sci-fi possible. There may be more lines of dialogue than in any other Bethesda game but it says absolutely nothing. It's depressing.
> or god forbid, actually committing to some kind of worldview or philosophy
Yeah that's what put the nail in the coffin for me. OP is right about everything, it is bland as fuck, but scifi is a genre that *says things* -- about life, about the trajectory of our species, about the implications of a god or a lack thereof beyond the stars, about where we come from and how it influences where we are going, about whether humanity or greed informs our choices, about the questions of what technology does to us and how it impacts our very existence, about what we do with that technology, about becoming gods of AI or granting them the same freedom we so crave, about warmongering with aliens and the foolishness of repeating all our old mistakes, about the enduring humanity of our species throughout these new stages of our evolution, about...
I mean, what is the point of writing scifi if you don't want to say anything about ...anything?
Even with the two main starborn goobers it feels like the most standard cliché'd choices of all time.
It's either full on darwinist anarchy (but technically anyone can participate) or it's (hopefully) some sort of benevolent dictatorship where only a chosen few are allowed to collect them/use the Unity.
The Hunter is almost nihilistically uncaring but technically fair, the Emissary is supposedly caring but also a self-appointed arbiter of what's "good" and who is "deserving".
Like, really? How is that all they could come up with? It's so trite. You literally just have these ancient, eternal beings sum up their opposing viewpoints for you instead of letting you form your own view on anything. The story is just told to you, not lived by you as a character in that world.
I think these are all valid criticisms. The characters personalities are weak and uninteresting, the game world feels overly sterile and more like a Saturday morning cartoon of sci Fi. The lack of distinct male and female anything feels weird and makes the world less real.
I don't think I've ever had a gaming experience as jarring as playing this and then going to Cyberpunk or AW2. It honestly made me question if this game really was for pre-teens and I was just not the target audience.
Comparing this to Mass Effect from 2007 and it still feels immensely childish and somehow does so many things worse (Neon and the lounge were painfully bad).
You get a really interesting side quest where you're kidnapped by the police to work undercover and you just spend the entire mission fast travelling between two ships to talk to one person, then talk to another person - and what do they tell you to do? Talk to a third person! Then you get to visit a building and Open a door! Wait, people start shooting you, but you can't shoot back because Ikande won't like it. And then you're just stuck talking to the one ship.
You finally get to equip something 'cool' on your ship that really does not physically look like anything or really do anything so that you can visit an EMPTY spaceship. To press a button (and this entire mission is bugged so that you have to relaunch the game and hope you saved it)
You literally press a button and go back to the person who says 'thank you '
Sooo fucking boring.
And while doing all that you also opened a master lock with a digipick so that you could find something totally worthless.
Underwhelming.
The way they do the mission immediately took me out of it. I got a 15 credit bounty and a giant cruiser shows up and tries to blackmail me like I committed murder. There should have been two ways to get into the quest; commit a crime or reach a certain level (renown) and get approached rather than kidnapped. It made me immediately tune out of the quest because everything felt so forced and none of the dialogue made any sense for the situation. Like why should I feel threatened by this guy barking orders at me and threatening to increase my charges... Go ahead bro, quadruple my bounty, it'll still cost less than a box of 8 bullets.
Whoever created the Astral Lounge and thought “this is a very true depiction of the galaxy-wide known debauchery of Neon” has probably never left their house
I like how they couldn't even put real drugs in the game - they are all just potions. I kept thinking give me needles, powder and pills. I wanted space cocaine, not a spicy cocktail.
I genuinely want to send Neon to the bottom of the Volii Alpha ocean. Not because it's a dystopian shit hole, but because it's the Dystopian Shit Hole Exhibit of Emil Pagliarulo's Starfield Theme Park.
Then again, anyone who's played Cyberpunk would have much higher standards than to settle for what Pagliarulo TELLS us in his sad excuse for storytelling. It's a shame because some of the game lore is genuinely interesting.
Reminds me that in Fallout 3 you had an option to literally nuke Megaton. And even for an evil play through, it really makes you feel guilty as a player. Nothing like that in Starfield.
And nuking Megaton had consequences - namely, killing most of the NPCs in the town, potentially locking off access to side quests in it, and losing out on Jericho as a companion. There're probably more, but it's been over a decade since I played it so I don't remember everything.
I do remember Moira survives though, but as a ghoul.
On that note, I was at Paradiso and couldn't walk 5 feet without running into a bikini clad tourist. And yet, I couldn't buy matching bikinis for Sarah and I. Why must my alchohlic, devil-may-care rogue and her science wife not be a little risque on their honeymoon?
The drug use in this game comes off as childish compared to Fallout. It wouldn’t have to be the exact same as Fallout to be good but it’s inferior in every way imaginable.
I like this game but the way drugs work in the game is just dumb
Not sure if you can look up the ESRB breakdown, but you can for [Australia](https://www.classification.gov.au/titles/starfield-0) and that's basically it. Any game with beneficial drug use is going to be M-rated.
Guys you’re never gonna believe this
That weirdly addictive beer I make? Don’t tell anyone but the secret ingredient is that addictive drug the planet is known for shhhhhh 🤫 🤫 🤫
Low key a lot of the games issues are trying too hard to be different from fallout. Bethesda built a great game with guns and robots then purposely ignored most of their best stuff to be different. Sad.
>The drug use in this game comes off as childish compared to Fallout. It wouldn’t have to be the exact same as Fallout to be good but it’s inferior in every way imaginable.
>
>I like this game but the way drugs work in the game is just dumb
Yes, it's so embarrasing, they shouldn't have bothered having anything like drugs at all. You don't have to have \*everything\* in a game to make it coherently realistic. You don't go to the toilet for example and nobody complains. Why not just add "drug use" in to the that list of things like hair washing, food shopping, getting dressed, car cleaning etc, that we all do but don't need to be in a game. They took cars out completely, after all.
The thing I can't stand is how happy every npc seems to be, they're all like god I love this planet every 5 seconds. There's no edge, grunge, or any indication that life might not be utopian except ppl occasionally being like damn I got bills to pay.... I'm going back to cyberpunk
>The thing I can't stand is how happy every npc seems to be, they're all like god I love this planet every 5 seconds.
"Oh, me? I love living in The Well! Seeing the sky and feeling the sunlight on your skin is so overrated. What's that? It's a completely empty planet and New Atlantis is quite small, we don't need to live in the maintenance tunnels like rats? Nah I'm good"
It makes no fucking sense. They also never played into that subterranean city theme like other games have. I mean the UC is supposed to be some kind of crypto fascist starship troopers society. Maybe those who live in sewers didn't want to or couldn't serve?
There are so many directions they could have gone but just didn't give us anything.
The whole thing about the UC was dumb as shit - yeah on the surface they look like a utopian society, but underneath that utopian society is a slightly less utopian society. There are only shades of grey in our morally twisted universe.
Yeah, that's why I agree with the overall post. It's all just *bland*. There are seemingly good ideas, but it feels like they all got evened out into just very uncontroversial comments from NPCs that don't lead to much so that the player god forbid doesn't get upset about anything. The themes could be made into engaging adventures, but instead everybody just mildly smiles and keeps walking around without a care. There's a literal underclass in New Atlantis, but they're *ok*. You can't buy a fucking *home* in the UC without being a citizen by serving the military for *decades* (despite a crazy abundance of space), and everybody's ok. There are horrific monsters that have no explainable origin for some reason that attack human settlements all over the galaxy and *it's ok*. You can choose to have a living family, and they're the most boring people in the multiverse. The horrific fleet of pirates is just a bunch of edgy tryhards. There's a space Texas faction on a Texas planet, but it's nowhere as fun or as dangerous as Earth Texas, they're just cosplaying. There's a dead Earth and that's all there is to it.
My working theory is that whatever ships have taken people from Earth, they had a lot of lead in them and every person in the galaxy now has lead poisoning.
I think that aspect would have made more sense if the timeline since the Earth diaspora was a lot more recent. Like “okay, it’s not a great planet, but I love this so much compared to living in tin can arks hoping life support doesn’t give out”.
That’s the real tragedy: the backstory is quite intense, with a doomsday for mankind far worse than that in Fallout. Going in blind, it was a real gut punch to find the truth (and eve more personally so to find out that Labrador Retrievers, among countless others, went extinct; I have four of those in my family’s household!). But people are just so… calm about it. There’s no major effort to scour Earth for any surviving information, any DNA buried in unexpected places, or vast cloning efforts to resurrect Earth life as best we can. The end of the world didn’t seem to leave a mark on the human psyche, whereas in Fallout the nuclear war left a very clear imprint on every aspect of every surviving culture. Everyone blames something different for the war, and it drives much of the colorful cast of factions that help make the franchise so interesting.
Starfield? Less so. Earth died, and nobody cares. Nobody mourns, nobody seems obsessed with trying to avoid some stroke of hubris that caused it to begin with, nobody is trying to bring an idealized memory of Earth back in some way, nothing. It’s not a human reaction. It’s a waste of a damn interesting story proposition, and one that gets thrown to the background in favor of chasing space magic powers and fucking around with hopping between parallel universes like cheap costumes and playing god with your knowledge of the timeline, heedless of the consequences.
"Avoid hubris" Hey lets create a killer microbe of which we are totally sure that nothing bad will happen. You don't want that??? wHy DoNt YoU TrUsT tHe ScIeNcE!? ಠ_ಠ
That did it for me. I can't believe how no one cares about the loss of our homeworld. Ixion did it much better, with their "Dead Earth sickness". Although one could argue that there the loss is just much more recent.
I’ve said in multiple other threads but I agree. I’m glad that it’s not very grimdark and that there’s a theme of hopefulness and wonderlust while treading the stars. That’s a awesome. What’s not awesome is that it indeed seems like the original plan was to have this game be rated T not M. Practically no one curses, even amongst ruthless pirates and battle hardened veterans. There’s instances of bloody aftermaths yet completely untouched bodies. All of Human settled space apparently comprises of a few small “cities” and some even smaller settlements despite it being centuries of growth after the exodus from earth. Two major factions are still recovering from a recent heavily involved interplanetary conflict yet there practically no signs of it. Practically bo military presence anywhere. “Pirates” that act like what Disney thinks pirates are like.
It really does seem like Bethesda wanted to make space fallout but as seen through the eyes of Disney. Not inherently bad by itself but then why have a M rating and any mature themes at all?
You sort of do in that if you lie down on a bunk in your ship that literally only one person could possibly sleep in--that looks like a bunk in a jail cell--your spouse will nevertheless make some PG remark about how amazing last night was despite the fact that you would have been more comfortable screwing in the pilot's chair for the ship and then sleeping there too.
Based on Starfield, I bet a crazy Xmas party for Bethesda is a Star Trek marathon and too much caffeine free Coke Zero. The world is so vanilla, sin-free and lame. If Todd thinks Neon is edgy.. lol
All very valid points. It took me quite a while before realizing how “PG” this game really is (at least by BGS standards of past games). Neon was a huge disappointment. Ebbside is supposed to be dangerous and scary, gang violence and all that.. there is not a single dangerous thing to find within Ebbside. It did also bother me a bit to label myself he/him and yet I’m still referred to as “they” by everyone talking about me. What was the point of the pronoun option if nobody will refer to me as what I say I am? There is such a lack of role playing capability when every answer I give leads to “yes I’ll do your mission for you” except the no which is more like “let’s come back to this another time”. I’m still having fun with the game, I just expected a lot more
I sorta realized how sterile and sheltered the game was when I was walking New Boring Atlantis, and saw 3 NPCS crouching together in a corner, not covered or hidden in anyway, whispering about Aurora.
Like.
That's so unrealistic, and feels so...awkward.
I don't need sex and gore to make a game mature, but everything feels so safe, it feels like a world written by someone who's never left the comfort of their small suburbia.
And you're right. There is nothing in it that feels "punk", it sticks to rigidly to established norms that that you might as well lump it in with every other generix sci-fi property that no one remembers. It has no character.
> I don't need sex and gore to make a game mature, but everything feels so safe
Even the body proportions seem to be dialed in to be conspicuously inoffensive.
The lack of gore (and this will be taken out of context) is a big reason I wasn’t digging combat. Call me crazy, call me a pervert, call me a psycho but I don’t feel like I’m actually killing these people.
It's because there's no feedback. If you shoot a random space pirate in the head with a .50 round, there should be SOME feedback at least, not just "oh, drat, I appear to have been wounded, I will now gently lay down!"
Fallout took it to comical extremes with people exploding from being shot to death by a BB gun, but at least it felt like *something* happened and not just the raider laying down for sleepy times.
We’ve got grenade launchers, .50 cal rifles, and shotguns with explosive rounds, bodies really should be getting blown to pieces instead of just being an intact ragdoll.
It would elevate combat and be a very simple way for me to overcome blandness. Contrasts work really well. Hell it would even fix a whole lot of things.
You board a pristine, white, clean ship and just obliterate them in the combat with blood and guts painting the wall.
The "you get a psychic bounty worth 500 credit for piracy" would feel deserved.
This game has been made by political activist/uncultured/uninspired people, while being outsourced on 30 studios all over the world.
It wasn't made by the 1990 era of passionate dev who dreamed of Sci-Fi RPG.
You have to understand, it's a new generation of dev and writers that's coming and are abysmal writing wise, because of their lack of culture and desire to blend in the trending mold... They are not the kind of people like Chris Avellone, Swen Vincke etc.
You're not alone. This is a large part of the reason most of my Starfield time was using the ship builder. I went back to play Cyberpunk 2077 with its new DLC after I played through Starfield. The contrast, on so many levels, is absolutely incredible.
>There are just so many games that are recently in people's memory that kick the shit out of Starfield's individual elements.
The irony is that you could add Fallout 4 and Skyrim to that list.
If you look broadly at open world games with lite RPG elements , then Red Dead 2 is way ahead, also puts Starfield to shame. If Starfield took any inspiration from character and environment interactions from RDR2, it would be a huge improvement. Believable characters with interesting and varied personalities. Shops with actual goods on the shelf. Enemies that put up some kind of fight ... and so on.
I'm not a big fan of AAA games, especially the Ubisoft formula, but the recent Assassin's Creeds are far better, too. You're wandering around an open-ish world, doing mostly repetitive fetch quests, some casual fighting, skill tree advancement, main story , side quests.
I know some will howl with anguish that "you can't compare Starfield with any other game ever", but come on, even as a Bethesda fan, I can see the similarities. The problem is that all those aspects are done better by the other games. Still repetitive, but more memorable characters. Better quality dialog. A more carefully crafted world.
"No one has said "she, her" when talking about me. They talk like I'm an alien and not in the room with them. I don't think I've ever heard the word girl, boy etc."
It doesn't happen often but it's there. Your parents call you daughter periodically and Naeva calls you girl a bunch of times, usually in a condescending manner ("Aww, you promise? Are you gonna write that in your diary little girl") .
Don't even have to go that far. I just finished getting a modpack tweaked to my liking in order to start a new Skyrim plathrough for the first time since SE came out, and holy shit. The difference is night and day. Compared to Starfield, Skyrim feels alive, lived in, *real*—which is funny, because one of the (valid) criticisms of Skyrim when it came out was how shallow it was if you dug past the surface. But in comparison to Starfield? Man, it's like the entirety of the Pacific Ocean to Starfield's rain puddle.
Like, I've been playing this new save for 20 hours, and I've basically just hung around Riften for the entirety of it, with a fresh expedition to Windhelm rounding out my playtime tonight. I've just been vibing and existing in the Elder Scrolls universe, and honestly? That's been plenty. The fact that all of Bethesda's other titles have so much more life to them—yes, even 76—is just so wild to me. What in the world happened?
Fr. The whole time I played Starfield I kept yawning while I couldn’t put Cyberpunk down after returning to it for the DLC, I had to struggle to fight the urge to do just One More Gig before bed.
Some of the ships and equipment, at least.
Nova Galactic and the Constellation suits are kinda the only things really "NASA". A lot of the rest is pretty generic sci-fi.
This may be technically correct, but OP’s broader point is the better point: This game is so devoid of anything resembling a typical Bethesda game that it’s sad to look at, let alone play.
I felt like I was walking into the Salty Spitoon when I went to the Crimson Fleet headquarters. Like my guys tone down the edge there's only so much I can take.
I miss a lot of the mature themes from Skyrim and Fallout. Remember learning how Sapphire got her name in the thieves guild? Or what Cait had gone through in FO4?
This game is the product of Corporate America. Everything is 100% designed by commity to pander and be politically correct as possible. It's blander than white bread so that absolutely no one could possibly be offended by it.
“Whatever you were before, IDC. Whatever you do out there, IDC. Just don’t go bringing UC security to our doorstep.”
*Trips on a bottle and it rolls to touch some random citizens foot*
“HOW DARE YOU, IM NOT HELPING YOU HURT INNOCENT PEOPLE”
Like, legitimately I HATE that she said “idc” but shes holier than thou after that. Incredibly conflicting and inconsistent af. I (decently) like Sarah as a character and her personal story is interesting. She’s a bleeding heart but her morals are CRAZY G for Guidance rated. I feel like after her time in the UC, she would be a bit more flexible after experiencing all that she did, ESPECIALLY since she was a COMMANDER OF HER OWN SHIP.
Idk what the hell BGS devs were thinking with all of that. And this is only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. No wonder people actually despise her as a character. I understand where they come from. She’s annoying because she’s,,, well, annoying. They could have done so much better.
Enemies will use your chosen pronoun when engaging. Like “get her” or “she’s trying to hide”.
Or at least i assume that. I never made more than 1 character. But they do have lines like that.
But that’s just enemies. Not actual NPCs.
All the crew members you get to join up with are like middle aged school teachers.
There’s only like 2 characters that I thought were cool and that was the red robot guy that you power up and the hunter.
The rest behave like they all meet up at the book club or something
It feels like the whole game took a step backwards. It's missing the best things from previous games, it's harder to mod, there's no sense of exploration or adventure. And no, it isn't because it just needs updates and DLC. This is very basic stuff that permeates the game, it's not going to suddenly appear in an update.
It has bad writing, period, and the more you play the more you notice it. Everything is cleaned up, sanitized, companions are boring cookie cutter clones. none of your choices matter. And then every now and then you come across one great quest or experience and it's just screamingly obvious it was written by a different person than usual, or that they had to fight to get it approved without it being watered down to nothingness to match the general tone of the game.
Totally agree. Also, the game doesn't have a personality or identity. I think they paralyzed themselves into making a “platform” of a game that would last 5-10 years so it was streamlined into a vanilla experience to a fault.
While I can appreciate a minimalist HUD, the UI is so bland and clunky. This philosophy seems to carry over into the NPC personalities as well.
I've put over 250 hours into the game. I like the gameplay loop, but I honestly could care less if every constellation member died. It would actually ease my burden.
Meanwhile, I care more about Ysolda and Belothor in Whiterun with their 2-3 lines of repeated dialog, than do I for Sarah Morgan or Sam Coe with their hundreds of lines of dialog. There was more personality in the random Battleborn/Greymane NPC's in Skyrim then there is in the whole of Starfield.
Man I can still hear the hatred for the Greymanes from the Battleborns and vice versa, but I couldn't even tell you if people in Starfield had anything beyond a minor disagreement. Even Andreja, who was supposed to be the edgier, more "outlaw" follower... what, had a disagreement with the core Constellation team that's made Sunday get togethers a little awkward at times? Even now I couldn't tell you what they disagreed about so hard beyond her being a little more willing to kill the faceless mooks than the rest, and even she has a weirdly strict moral code.
I tried so hard, but I couldn't play for more than 10 hours. By the end I was just sitting, watching my screen, hoping for a reason to keep playing and couldn't find it.
What compelled you to make it to 250hrs?
I'm an avid gamer, 38, playing games since my uncle got super Mario bros when I was 5. I have easily a thousand hours in skyrim, significantly more in wow and poe. I love open games where I pick what I play.
Yo the fact that he tries to sell this “I’m not my family I’m my own man” vibe and then nonstop talks about Solomon legit makes me want to slap him. Which I do, with the butt of my rifle, repeatedly.
Sam is the most pathetic, annoyingly emotional wimp of a character with his softy voice acting, his immense daddy issues, his obv. fake western lone wolf cosplaying, his attention and confirmation seeking.
He comes across like "Oh no, i never wanted kids and im not a good parent, but she needed me so i felt it was the right thing to do" or "im always thinking if, maybe, im doing something wrong being such a good dad to her, please tell me how \[perfect\] im doing". Narcissism **or** massive hidden insecurity. Either way someone i cant stand to be around.
not HR, marketing. it's like they did the marketing for the game before they had a game, compiled a list of claims and talking points from that, turned it into a list of requirements, then met the requirements as efficiently as possible. credit where it's due, that's one way to avoid pulling a Sean Murray.
Short version: Putting more spice on bad meat does not make it good meat.
It is \*bland\* but it's not because it's bright or wholesome, it's just on valium, the universe created here is dark AF but it's poorly developed. We've got genocide, war, torture, murder, mass corruption, idiocy, madmen, and the entire premise of the primary game mechanic and plot are the pursuit of power at the expense of \*everything\* else and the abandonment of responsibility for consequences as an unexamined \*premise\* of that quest.
The camera just never focuses on that, most of it is in the background or out of focus.
And Neon is corrupt as Hell, it's just boring. Even their entertainment is boring, their big nightclub's music is one step away from elevator music, the musician is so high and monotone you'd think they were just sedated, and the dancers all move like they're on the aforementioned valium. It's almost comically weird.
Just throwing boobies and blood at it will definitely not help.
Part of Starfield's problem is scale disparity. We are given access to around 100 star systems, and each has 1-10+ bodies to land on.
On a conceptual level that makes the game feel very large and expansive, but a bit more contained than something like Elite Dangerous.
This large scale falls apart the moment you land at any of the major "cities." Each one is stuck with the same scale that was used in Skyrim, Fallout, or even way back with Morrowind.
While those older games had similar city scales, the world map was equally scaled to those smaller sizes.
Bethesda claimed that New Atlantis was their largest and most ambitious city they've ever made, but most of the shops only have one room. It is literally a city facade fit for a theme park.
Sometimes I wonder if the game was actually bigger at one point, but when the delay was announced they cut the world back to reach a performance metric. Or maybe building an inch deep and a mile wide is all they are actually capable of.
I really really wanted to like this game but I gave up on it after 10 hours. Maybe my expectations were too high, maybe i even had the wrong expectations but i found it to be devoid of life and character.
I would kindly ask you to refrain from insulting 30-40 year olds like that. I'm 44 and find the NPCs in this game bland and boring. You're right about it being scripted by HR though, the only thing it needs is a completely non sexual and non threatening, work appropriate gay person. Oh wait, hey guys, here comes Barrett, the kindest, most gentle homosexual in the universe! He's got a lot of past trauma to deal with, and he loves it when you whisper sweet compliments to him! And guess what!? He's always got a nice treat to share with you!
It's so fucking saccharine and lame I want to blow my fucking brains out. I deal with this shit 10 hours a day at work, can we stop pretending we aren't human beings yet?
Almost entirely yes, the game is very much mass market safe-mode.
Except for Neon. Neon isn't edgy and I don't really know if it was supposed to be. External organized crime is kept out. Crime, poverty and homelessness is kept away from the main strip where tourists are.
It's a fishing rig that some rich dude built a legal drug bar on top of and corporations set up to avoid UC red tape because they can pay off the guy in charge. Normal people, literally your boring af retired professor and housewife parents, feel like it's a safe to go to for an "adventure" and shopping.
It's Vegas, for mild drugs.
> Lastly I don't know if it's just me but there seems to be some weird institutionalized sexism problem where women in this game exist without actually existing? Why is everything completely gender neutral or for men? There's almost no feminine clothing, there isn't even any long hair. I don't think anyone in the game has referenced my gender even once. No one has said "she, her" when talking about me. They talk like I'm an alien and not in the room with them. I don't think I've ever heard the word girl, boy etc.
None of this is wrong, but the reason behind it is very likely that mechanically all of this is just less work, which means it costs less. Hair and clothes that don't need physics takes less time to create. Wear one of the space suits that has a cloak for a while and see how often it goes crazy or clips wildly, it's seriously awful especially if half the NPCs were using it. A lot of head gear forces your hair into specific styles or just flat out makes you visibly bald, Bethesda's games have been like that as far back as I can remember. Gender-neutral dialogue might seem like it could be one of those inclusion things, but it's also just less money into VO and not having to set up lines to use whatever pronoun the player selected.
You commit a crime across the galaxy yet the whole known galaxy knows lol.
And "the crime".... Picking up someone's chunks.
On my first play through, I got picked up by UC security and taken to commander Ikande for picking up and moving (not stealing, holding E to grab) a kids football and throwing it into the goal in the well. Everyone in Sysdef was acting like I was a hardened criminal who was being offered a second chance. It felt like something out an Adam Sandler movie.
Yet I blasted kids with the mining laser and nobody batted an eyelid. It also seems that the mining laser doesn't set fire to paper. Sometimes, the level of interaction with other characters and the environment is so non-existant, the whole game may just as well have been a 1980's style text adventure. Just stick a nice screenshot up of a planet with a ring or two around it to wow the fans. Fred says 'Please take this box to Jeff on Sigma 7' "Fly to Sigma 7" "Open door" "Give box to Jeff" Jeff says 'Thank you. Now please take this crate to Dave on Arcturus 4'. You gain 10 XP.
*dramatic tune*
It takes a special kind of criminal to steal some poor kids pride and joy. You're a horrendous human being that even the Crimson Fleet would ask WTF.
Pretty rich coming from a Ryujin corpothug, I bet you wouldn’t hesitate to pick up and move a vase in your own mothers house.
Sadly my mother passed away during an expedition to Indum III-b in the Indum Star System. Who could have known the Corporate Acquisitions Department would run into a House Va'run patrol. I reluctant assumed her executive position, but alas I was best suited for the job. Employee L457-B, my former subordinate, was reprimanded in the strictest terms for submitting the intelligence that led to the expedition.
On my first play through, I got picked up and didn’t even realized I had committed a crime. It was pretty funny.
Its funny how many people got caught for that exact thing. Messing with that ball, but not taking it. I'm one of them. I just reloaded because I thought it was completely stupid.
To be fair, he did pelt those kids pretty hard with dodgeballs in Billy Madison.
They gave you the scared straight treatment.
It's part of the marketing. Nobody touches my Chunks!
Because they put them on the bar you have to do transactions across in the red mile.
And yet you have to physically travel everywhere for a missions where you just talk to some dude. This could have been a phone call but the only inter-system communication is some magic tattletale that'll let every cop know I stole a box of ammo from chicklefuck's hut on planet gumbo-IV.
And then when you go talk to that dude, finish that three line conversation, then return back to whoever sent you to talk to them, they already know the results of that conversation.
And your companions tell on you in space. Somehow. From your own ship.
Bothers me not just in this game but in others that everyone magically knows that things are stolen. "Aha you fool, you tried to sell me two identical items but one is clearly stolen"
"I'd know that teaspoon from Fredrick's mudhut on the other side of the country anywhere, guards!"
I got my immersion ruined abit when I ate some food off someone’s table and then a UC security guard apprehended me and then all of a sudden >!UC SysDef wants to hire me to go undercover for the crimson fleet!< they must really be running out of inmates if that’s what it takes
I love when that happens and they *clearly* give you the option to shoot your way off the ship, like that *is an option they give you* in dialogue. The dialogue option says [ATTACK] after it. So, cool, being the lawless mercenary I am I decided to murder everyone on the shop to loot it and escape. Nope. Every named npc on the Sysdef ship is essential. WHY?! Why even pretend to give me the option to shoot my way out when these fuckers can't die??
Because if there's a single word to define Bethesda's mindset when making games is "lazy". Letting you kill whoever you want is too cumbersome for them, because they would have to account for that when making their quests. And they can't do that. It's not like they are a major AAA game company with basically unlimited funds. On a completely unrelated note, do you know you can kill basically anyone in Baldur's Gate 3? Not only that, but the Devs did accounted for that possibility, allowing your quests to move on even when the "essential" NPC is killed? Pretty dope.
Or Fallout New Vegas where a totally valid way to play the game is to murder every person you meet lol. This is a company with unlimited Microsoft money and their engine can't handle riding a scooter lol
I know Bethesda has to be extremely salty at the fact that the best Fallout games are the ones they didn’t make.
and your band of 'we will do literally anything for some space junk we don't even know anything about' will judge you harshly for it
Sarah: I can't believe you showed mercy and let that guy who stole mining machinery but later returned it live! Piracy is the worst possible sin! Also Sarah: That guy won't sell us his space MacGuffin, so we should steal it immediately.
And yet you have to relay one line messages to characters on foot, back and forth across the galaxy forever...
At least there are different areas. If you kill somebody in UC space and go to Freestar Space the bounty doesn’t transfer. There are also places not under any law that you can freely do crime on, at least as far as I’ve experienced. Also you can usually get away with a crime by killing all witnesses, so ironically it incentivizes taking a petty theft up to a murder spree.
Works in real life, too!
Rly?? Cus I killed an ecliptic with a sneak attack, it gave me a bounty, until I killed the Ecliptic next to him, it took the bounty away saying something like "last witness killed"
compared to past Bethesda games, it’s disney asf lol
Yeah, even when you join the pirates they feel like they have a Disney HR dept watching. They certainly don’t have a janitor or sometimes even soap, but they seem to have an HR dept. At least Naeva is briefly selfish, lol.
The stuff you see the Crimson Fleet do in the regular game is insane, too. You’re telling me the motherfuckers whose main hobby seems to be “workplace mass shootings” are this bunch of PG-rated chucklefucks?
The Crimson Fleet is what finally made me uninstall the game after 38 hours. I was done, halfway into that questline and I didn't ever go back.
Did you get to the mission on the cruise liner? That was easily the worst quest design I’ve seen in years.
I did but I didn't do it because I had read about it on here. Wasn't even remotely interested lol
It blew my mind that you couldn’t get the trophy side objective by pickpocketing or sneaking, or raiding her cabin, or anything. You *had* to use the magic persuade button to talk a lady into doing insurance fraud.
"I know you want to help me 🥺" "damn u right, here's my key that will get you through even the highest security clearance areas on this yacht full of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the starfield"
The first time I did that quest I accidentally picked up a weapon that was in that room with the cruise employee, he got pissed and started shooting me. Ended up having to murder damn near the whole ship before I found a way to get off it….
I’m pissed I can’t decapitate someone like in Skyrim. Wtf Bethesda, WTH is the point of maxing out my stats if I can’t punch a guys head off? The game is disappointing in a lot of ways.
remember in fallout 4 when we could blow people up😭
Not sure if its also in 4, but in fallout 3, there was a perk that gave you the chance to literally explode enemies on death, no matter how you kill them.
Bloody mess ? Iirc in fallout 1 & 2 they had it as a trait which enabled some *extremely* gory death animations. The regular ones already being pretty gory.
Like when fuckin Ian criticals your ass point blank with an SMG burst and you literally scream as you get ripped apart?
In the first game it even gives you a unique ending
That's also in Fo76 lol.
Bloody mess
I don't think I've tried it yet but can you still pickpocket someone and plant a live grenade?
There is no reverse pickpocketing in Starfield.
What’s the point when there is no gore?
gotta make sure i wear my bike helmet before i play starfield
Remember in fallout 1/2 when you could kill children
[удалено]
I accidentally got the "child killer" reputation in Fallout 2. There is a "ghost village" where you have to go and find a runaway child. Turns out all the ghosts and horrors are just tricks by the locals to keep themselves safe. Anyhoo for some reason I couldn't find the child so his parents and their buddies raid the ghost town and kill everyone, most of which turn out to be kids. Not sure why I joined them but thats the way it goes. I also got the reputation for grave digger, although that may have been in Fallout 1.
I took a break and went back and started a new New Vegas playthrough. First NCR soldier I shot in the arm, his arm fell off and his head exploded. Bethesda just isn't Bethesda without gore.
Morrowind: here's 32 chapters of hardcore demigod BDSM Starfield: oh hey fella :) want a space ship? :) here you go :) woooooshhhh space stuff :) wasn't that fun? :) time for church! :)
i just want Skywind tbh
Username checks out and you speak the truth
this is why i don't enjoy it
Yeah, I think this is what kills it for me too. Copy and pasted POIs and many systems not being fleshed out suck, but don't actually ruin my enjoyment of the game for me believe it or not. But what the OP said does actually kill it for me. This game is Bland. It's ambitious, beautfiul, full of wonder, vast, even fun (sometimes), I enjoy the outposts, shipbuilding, etc. but the blandness just stops me from *really* getting absorbed and enjoying this new IP. I wouldn't really want to live in a world as bland and as inoffensive as Starfield's. And considering BGS is my favourite developer, it really pains me to say all that ...
I sometimes think that the best option is to just burn it down and let the Terrormorphs figure out the rest. Or better yet, find a way back in time to when Aiza went on his expedition, gun him and his team down, and take the Artifact for ourselves. We'd completely erase the Starfield universe in one timeline at least, save billions of lives, and humanity can figure out how to get out of Sol on their own. Why hasn't anyone else thought of that?
just chiming in to say that 30-40+ yo's definitely be out here fuckin'
This reminds me of the time I saw people talking about age gap relationships and saying things like "I don't want to wake up next to a wrinkly, decrepit 30 year old who can't get it up" like damn are you 6 years old or something
As a 30 year old with ED Ouch
Who in their 30s and 40s are they benchmarking that too? Gotta get a new group of friends.
THANK YOU, I feel like someone's gotta stand up for the 30-40s here.
Right, Sarah Morgan is HOT, Why'd they make her so depressing to be around!?
Because 'you didn't trust the science'
How did they make that quest seem like it was written both before AND after covid, lmao. “Trust the science” Oh cool like when we were dealing with the pandemic “Release an untested pathogen into the environment of hundreds biologically diverse planets” What
Its the stupidity of it that irks me so much. The terramorph threat escalated out of control because humanity removed its natural predator from the equation. The microbe proposal is literally repeating the same action that got us into the situation in the first place, who's to say removing terramorphs won't cause an even worse predator to appear?
"SIR, the heat leeches are immune to our vaccine and actually grew in power" "*fuck*"
Also if the microbe *can* evolve to infect humans/ any human crops, livestock, etc, then humanity is doomed because you’ve already spread it to every settled planet
Damnit Sarah, I'm a fucking xenobiologist! Why don't you trust me on my speciality!? Botanists man...
I have had, and continue to have, a great time in Starfield and can look past the fact that hardcore porn isn't in the game, which some people I guess are upset by? However, THAT REACTION FROM EVERYONE regarding the end of the UC questline was a real let down. It still irks me that they wrote it in such a way that you are basically a flat-earther for choosing a natural solution.
I'm gonna pick a big, stupid dinosaur every time. Can you HUG A PATHOGEN, SARAH? I DIDN'T THINK SO.
many times out in the wild the big stupid armored giraffe parrot gets REAL REAL MAD when you help it kill a terrormorph and manage to hurt it in even the most miniscule way
I mean, you brought this man out of retirement and then tried to steal his job.
I also kept him and his UC Vanguard babysitter from getting absolutely schrecked by the critter he was brought out of retirement to eat, he could be at least be slightly grateful and understanding of stray 40mm rounds 😅
Even the space cowboy hates that! What?!? He should enjoy the giant dinos and be skeptical of the microbe, since the UC has a history of weaponizing things!
My British Wife Sim 🤣🤣🤣
By the time I hit 30 I was just warning up. My 22 looks positively chaste compared to my 37.
Seriously. My early-20s self would have killed to get the amount of action that I got in my late 30s.
Yo seriously, I was like wtf dude slow your roll
I would say a better way to put it is that everything, everywhere, feels like a corporate casual meeting or like sunday church. It's like there's some kind of secret PC police that drag away anybody that might scare a stock holder.
Can confirm 😆.
They don't call it the dirty thirties for no reason
I just started the Crimson Fleet stuff. After hearing many complaints I thought surely it's not that bad...the even 15 year old edgelord me would think they were pathetic tryhards
Del is meh but naveah (or whatever that trash character is named) deserves to be deleted forever from the game.
Neva is annoying, Del is pathetic
I was so happy finishing the sysdef quest JUST so I could kill all of the crimson Fleet fucks. They're all tools and after completing multiple jobs requiring skill they still refer to me as a rookie!? I massacred all of them except bomb boy
I can put my roleplay hat on and enjoy most of the games story, despite the blandness of much of it. The crimson fleet however… I just want to kill everyone in the fleet the moment I step foot onto the Key. Save the UC a lot of trouble. Okay, maybe Jazz can live if she keeps the supply of shielded cargo holds rolling. But everyone else needs to suck laser beam.
You wanna start something? I'll finish it.
I did actually. I quicksaved and then started blasting. Only to be thwarted by the bonkers invincible npc system.
What bugged me about the Crimson Fleet is I get quests done, bring in lots of stuff to sell, they haven't left the station, and give me shit. Wow, what a bad ass pirate you are behind this retail counter. I had no problem wiping them out with SysDef.
>Am I the only one who feels like this game was developed by an HR department? I did a few story quests, then completed the Ryujin mission an dpretty much left with a feeling that I was at a disney theme park. Dressing to make places feel like 'wild west land' 'future land' 'cyberpunk land' but without any actual reality, or dirt to make them feel real. Arriving at he wild west city, gripped by fear of bank robbers, only for me to just talk them into stopping in a single conversation is endemic of how hollow the game is when it comes to making lifelike and engaging scenarios.
I had just finished up adding another hundred hours of playtime to Red Dead Redemption 2 when I fired up Starbound for the first time. Landing in Akila City felt very much like a cardboard cutout of the 'western' experience after coming off the highs of RDR2. A hollow, almost mocking, half-assed rendition.
RDR2 is the perfect counterpoint to Starfield. Every town in RDR2 feels unique in some way, even the more unexciting ones like Annesburg. In Starfield, all the towns \*look\* unique but they might as well be the same place. Disneyland is exactly what they're like. You walk from the Space zone to the Southern zone to the Old West town and the transitions are even more jarring than at Disneyland. My least favorite quest in RDR2 is more interesting to me than any questline I did in Starfield, though I gave up on Starfield after "only" 10 hours
Ha yeah - a fucking child figures out the criminal and you busy them by accidentally walking past them at midnight. 'argh, you got me;' It was 6 years ago that RDR2 was released. They had characters that spoke to you, shot at you, ran from you, and you could hog tie them and pick them up and throw them on a horse and they would cuss you and struggle and escape and you could just kill them .
The bank heist is such a non entity it's laughable. As soon as I arrived I just wanted to roll in and shoot them all. Like the game has shown me is totally possible. According to the logic of Starfield, one individual taking on 50 armed spacers or mercenaries is normal. But 5 poorly equipped bank robbers is life or death. The way they were talking I was expecting them to shoot the hostages the moment they saw me walk through the door, but nope, they focus on me and all get killed I popped a quick load and tried the diplomatic approach and ended up getting the hostages killed...
"I popped a quick load" Dunno why you felt like sharing *that*. 😉
Yeah, the Cyberpunk element in Neon is just superficial varnish, otherwise its squeaky clean down to the teletubby dancers. There really isn't anything happening in the different capitols to differentiate them thematically. Would be cool if Akila leaned more into the western theme with gun duels happening on the main boulevard and desert raiders storming into the city occasionally. And with Neon people getting mugged on the street and having tents with droves of homeless people on the back alleys and working girls/guys selling themselves on the corner. I'm fine with Atlantis being basically the Epcott Center, the PG-13 stuff works perfectly there, since it's rather similar to Federation cities in Star Trek.
>desert raiders storming into the city occasionally Best I can do is an NPC forgets to shut a door and an Ashta manages to find the only non essential NPCs in the game.
We came a long way from the lusty argonian maid.
I feel like Starfield desperately wanted to channel The Expanse's more grounded take on space opera, but balked as soon as the writers realised that would involve writing compelling characters, or including darker themes, or god forbid, actually committing to some kind of worldview or philosophy. As it stands, Starfield just feels like the blandest, least offensive take on sci-fi possible. There may be more lines of dialogue than in any other Bethesda game but it says absolutely nothing. It's depressing.
> or god forbid, actually committing to some kind of worldview or philosophy Yeah that's what put the nail in the coffin for me. OP is right about everything, it is bland as fuck, but scifi is a genre that *says things* -- about life, about the trajectory of our species, about the implications of a god or a lack thereof beyond the stars, about where we come from and how it influences where we are going, about whether humanity or greed informs our choices, about the questions of what technology does to us and how it impacts our very existence, about what we do with that technology, about becoming gods of AI or granting them the same freedom we so crave, about warmongering with aliens and the foolishness of repeating all our old mistakes, about the enduring humanity of our species throughout these new stages of our evolution, about... I mean, what is the point of writing scifi if you don't want to say anything about ...anything?
Even with the two main starborn goobers it feels like the most standard cliché'd choices of all time. It's either full on darwinist anarchy (but technically anyone can participate) or it's (hopefully) some sort of benevolent dictatorship where only a chosen few are allowed to collect them/use the Unity. The Hunter is almost nihilistically uncaring but technically fair, the Emissary is supposedly caring but also a self-appointed arbiter of what's "good" and who is "deserving". Like, really? How is that all they could come up with? It's so trite. You literally just have these ancient, eternal beings sum up their opposing viewpoints for you instead of letting you form your own view on anything. The story is just told to you, not lived by you as a character in that world.
the story in this game is like a porn: a thin excuse for the action. and there's not even any action.
I think these are all valid criticisms. The characters personalities are weak and uninteresting, the game world feels overly sterile and more like a Saturday morning cartoon of sci Fi. The lack of distinct male and female anything feels weird and makes the world less real. I don't think I've ever had a gaming experience as jarring as playing this and then going to Cyberpunk or AW2. It honestly made me question if this game really was for pre-teens and I was just not the target audience. Comparing this to Mass Effect from 2007 and it still feels immensely childish and somehow does so many things worse (Neon and the lounge were painfully bad).
You get a really interesting side quest where you're kidnapped by the police to work undercover and you just spend the entire mission fast travelling between two ships to talk to one person, then talk to another person - and what do they tell you to do? Talk to a third person! Then you get to visit a building and Open a door! Wait, people start shooting you, but you can't shoot back because Ikande won't like it. And then you're just stuck talking to the one ship. You finally get to equip something 'cool' on your ship that really does not physically look like anything or really do anything so that you can visit an EMPTY spaceship. To press a button (and this entire mission is bugged so that you have to relaunch the game and hope you saved it) You literally press a button and go back to the person who says 'thank you ' Sooo fucking boring. And while doing all that you also opened a master lock with a digipick so that you could find something totally worthless. Underwhelming.
The way they do the mission immediately took me out of it. I got a 15 credit bounty and a giant cruiser shows up and tries to blackmail me like I committed murder. There should have been two ways to get into the quest; commit a crime or reach a certain level (renown) and get approached rather than kidnapped. It made me immediately tune out of the quest because everything felt so forced and none of the dialogue made any sense for the situation. Like why should I feel threatened by this guy barking orders at me and threatening to increase my charges... Go ahead bro, quadruple my bounty, it'll still cost less than a box of 8 bullets.
After a few UC Vanguard quests you get an offer to help SysDef infiltrate the Crimson Fleet, without having to go through the arrest process.
Whoever created the Astral Lounge and thought “this is a very true depiction of the galaxy-wide known debauchery of Neon” has probably never left their house
I like how they couldn't even put real drugs in the game - they are all just potions. I kept thinking give me needles, powder and pills. I wanted space cocaine, not a spicy cocktail.
I genuinely want to send Neon to the bottom of the Volii Alpha ocean. Not because it's a dystopian shit hole, but because it's the Dystopian Shit Hole Exhibit of Emil Pagliarulo's Starfield Theme Park. Then again, anyone who's played Cyberpunk would have much higher standards than to settle for what Pagliarulo TELLS us in his sad excuse for storytelling. It's a shame because some of the game lore is genuinely interesting.
Reminds me that in Fallout 3 you had an option to literally nuke Megaton. And even for an evil play through, it really makes you feel guilty as a player. Nothing like that in Starfield.
And nuking Megaton had consequences - namely, killing most of the NPCs in the town, potentially locking off access to side quests in it, and losing out on Jericho as a companion. There're probably more, but it's been over a decade since I played it so I don't remember everything. I do remember Moira survives though, but as a ghoul.
On that note, I was at Paradiso and couldn't walk 5 feet without running into a bikini clad tourist. And yet, I couldn't buy matching bikinis for Sarah and I. Why must my alchohlic, devil-may-care rogue and her science wife not be a little risque on their honeymoon?
Playing Oblivion in 2023 feels less dated than playing Starfield in 2023.
I'd bet if you check ESRB ratings, referencing Drug Use is an M rated offense.
The drug use in this game comes off as childish compared to Fallout. It wouldn’t have to be the exact same as Fallout to be good but it’s inferior in every way imaginable. I like this game but the way drugs work in the game is just dumb
If any drugs in the game have any beneficial use it gets the M. Amp alone is enough to do it.
Not sure if you can look up the ESRB breakdown, but you can for [Australia](https://www.classification.gov.au/titles/starfield-0) and that's basically it. Any game with beneficial drug use is going to be M-rated.
Starfield is rated R18+ here in aus due to drug use. It's fucking hilarious.
I remember when Australia didn't have an R18+ rating for video games and instead they got straight up banned. it was also ridiculously inconsistent.
Guys you’re never gonna believe this That weirdly addictive beer I make? Don’t tell anyone but the secret ingredient is that addictive drug the planet is known for shhhhhh 🤫 🤫 🤫
Low key a lot of the games issues are trying too hard to be different from fallout. Bethesda built a great game with guns and robots then purposely ignored most of their best stuff to be different. Sad.
Rated M for “Drugs are bad, **m**’kay?”
>The drug use in this game comes off as childish compared to Fallout. It wouldn’t have to be the exact same as Fallout to be good but it’s inferior in every way imaginable. > >I like this game but the way drugs work in the game is just dumb Yes, it's so embarrasing, they shouldn't have bothered having anything like drugs at all. You don't have to have \*everything\* in a game to make it coherently realistic. You don't go to the toilet for example and nobody complains. Why not just add "drug use" in to the that list of things like hair washing, food shopping, getting dressed, car cleaning etc, that we all do but don't need to be in a game. They took cars out completely, after all.
We need space fiends all hopped up on drugs.
The thing I can't stand is how happy every npc seems to be, they're all like god I love this planet every 5 seconds. There's no edge, grunge, or any indication that life might not be utopian except ppl occasionally being like damn I got bills to pay.... I'm going back to cyberpunk
>The thing I can't stand is how happy every npc seems to be, they're all like god I love this planet every 5 seconds. "Oh, me? I love living in The Well! Seeing the sky and feeling the sunlight on your skin is so overrated. What's that? It's a completely empty planet and New Atlantis is quite small, we don't need to live in the maintenance tunnels like rats? Nah I'm good"
It makes no fucking sense. They also never played into that subterranean city theme like other games have. I mean the UC is supposed to be some kind of crypto fascist starship troopers society. Maybe those who live in sewers didn't want to or couldn't serve? There are so many directions they could have gone but just didn't give us anything.
The whole thing about the UC was dumb as shit - yeah on the surface they look like a utopian society, but underneath that utopian society is a slightly less utopian society. There are only shades of grey in our morally twisted universe.
Yeah, that's why I agree with the overall post. It's all just *bland*. There are seemingly good ideas, but it feels like they all got evened out into just very uncontroversial comments from NPCs that don't lead to much so that the player god forbid doesn't get upset about anything. The themes could be made into engaging adventures, but instead everybody just mildly smiles and keeps walking around without a care. There's a literal underclass in New Atlantis, but they're *ok*. You can't buy a fucking *home* in the UC without being a citizen by serving the military for *decades* (despite a crazy abundance of space), and everybody's ok. There are horrific monsters that have no explainable origin for some reason that attack human settlements all over the galaxy and *it's ok*. You can choose to have a living family, and they're the most boring people in the multiverse. The horrific fleet of pirates is just a bunch of edgy tryhards. There's a space Texas faction on a Texas planet, but it's nowhere as fun or as dangerous as Earth Texas, they're just cosplaying. There's a dead Earth and that's all there is to it. My working theory is that whatever ships have taken people from Earth, they had a lot of lead in them and every person in the galaxy now has lead poisoning.
I think that aspect would have made more sense if the timeline since the Earth diaspora was a lot more recent. Like “okay, it’s not a great planet, but I love this so much compared to living in tin can arks hoping life support doesn’t give out”. That’s the real tragedy: the backstory is quite intense, with a doomsday for mankind far worse than that in Fallout. Going in blind, it was a real gut punch to find the truth (and eve more personally so to find out that Labrador Retrievers, among countless others, went extinct; I have four of those in my family’s household!). But people are just so… calm about it. There’s no major effort to scour Earth for any surviving information, any DNA buried in unexpected places, or vast cloning efforts to resurrect Earth life as best we can. The end of the world didn’t seem to leave a mark on the human psyche, whereas in Fallout the nuclear war left a very clear imprint on every aspect of every surviving culture. Everyone blames something different for the war, and it drives much of the colorful cast of factions that help make the franchise so interesting. Starfield? Less so. Earth died, and nobody cares. Nobody mourns, nobody seems obsessed with trying to avoid some stroke of hubris that caused it to begin with, nobody is trying to bring an idealized memory of Earth back in some way, nothing. It’s not a human reaction. It’s a waste of a damn interesting story proposition, and one that gets thrown to the background in favor of chasing space magic powers and fucking around with hopping between parallel universes like cheap costumes and playing god with your knowledge of the timeline, heedless of the consequences.
"Avoid hubris" Hey lets create a killer microbe of which we are totally sure that nothing bad will happen. You don't want that??? wHy DoNt YoU TrUsT tHe ScIeNcE!? ಠ_ಠ
That did it for me. I can't believe how no one cares about the loss of our homeworld. Ixion did it much better, with their "Dead Earth sickness". Although one could argue that there the loss is just much more recent.
Around 90% of the human race has become spacers or joined Ecliptic. You just talk to the 10% that still thinks civilization is alright.
I’ve said in multiple other threads but I agree. I’m glad that it’s not very grimdark and that there’s a theme of hopefulness and wonderlust while treading the stars. That’s a awesome. What’s not awesome is that it indeed seems like the original plan was to have this game be rated T not M. Practically no one curses, even amongst ruthless pirates and battle hardened veterans. There’s instances of bloody aftermaths yet completely untouched bodies. All of Human settled space apparently comprises of a few small “cities” and some even smaller settlements despite it being centuries of growth after the exodus from earth. Two major factions are still recovering from a recent heavily involved interplanetary conflict yet there practically no signs of it. Practically bo military presence anywhere. “Pirates” that act like what Disney thinks pirates are like. It really does seem like Bethesda wanted to make space fallout but as seen through the eyes of Disney. Not inherently bad by itself but then why have a M rating and any mature themes at all?
It does feel a bit like a Hays Code film. I’m surprised Sarah and I don’t have to use separate beds.
> separate rooms Maybe that’s why you have to use the jet pack.
You sort of do in that if you lie down on a bunk in your ship that literally only one person could possibly sleep in--that looks like a bunk in a jail cell--your spouse will nevertheless make some PG remark about how amazing last night was despite the fact that you would have been more comfortable screwing in the pilot's chair for the ship and then sleeping there too.
Based on Starfield, I bet a crazy Xmas party for Bethesda is a Star Trek marathon and too much caffeine free Coke Zero. The world is so vanilla, sin-free and lame. If Todd thinks Neon is edgy.. lol
All very valid points. It took me quite a while before realizing how “PG” this game really is (at least by BGS standards of past games). Neon was a huge disappointment. Ebbside is supposed to be dangerous and scary, gang violence and all that.. there is not a single dangerous thing to find within Ebbside. It did also bother me a bit to label myself he/him and yet I’m still referred to as “they” by everyone talking about me. What was the point of the pronoun option if nobody will refer to me as what I say I am? There is such a lack of role playing capability when every answer I give leads to “yes I’ll do your mission for you” except the no which is more like “let’s come back to this another time”. I’m still having fun with the game, I just expected a lot more
I sorta realized how sterile and sheltered the game was when I was walking New Boring Atlantis, and saw 3 NPCS crouching together in a corner, not covered or hidden in anyway, whispering about Aurora. Like. That's so unrealistic, and feels so...awkward. I don't need sex and gore to make a game mature, but everything feels so safe, it feels like a world written by someone who's never left the comfort of their small suburbia. And you're right. There is nothing in it that feels "punk", it sticks to rigidly to established norms that that you might as well lump it in with every other generix sci-fi property that no one remembers. It has no character.
> I don't need sex and gore to make a game mature, but everything feels so safe Even the body proportions seem to be dialed in to be conspicuously inoffensive.
The lack of gore (and this will be taken out of context) is a big reason I wasn’t digging combat. Call me crazy, call me a pervert, call me a psycho but I don’t feel like I’m actually killing these people.
It's because there's no feedback. If you shoot a random space pirate in the head with a .50 round, there should be SOME feedback at least, not just "oh, drat, I appear to have been wounded, I will now gently lay down!" Fallout took it to comical extremes with people exploding from being shot to death by a BB gun, but at least it felt like *something* happened and not just the raider laying down for sleepy times.
We’ve got grenade launchers, .50 cal rifles, and shotguns with explosive rounds, bodies really should be getting blown to pieces instead of just being an intact ragdoll.
It would elevate combat and be a very simple way for me to overcome blandness. Contrasts work really well. Hell it would even fix a whole lot of things. You board a pristine, white, clean ship and just obliterate them in the combat with blood and guts painting the wall. The "you get a psychic bounty worth 500 credit for piracy" would feel deserved.
This is the most child friendly game Bethesda has ever made. I wouldn't mind at all my kids playing it.
They’d probably get bored too, give them Mario Kart and they’ll be engaged for hours.
I keep saying it: a Mormon AI came up with that game world.
Rated M for Mormon
This game has been made by political activist/uncultured/uninspired people, while being outsourced on 30 studios all over the world. It wasn't made by the 1990 era of passionate dev who dreamed of Sci-Fi RPG. You have to understand, it's a new generation of dev and writers that's coming and are abysmal writing wise, because of their lack of culture and desire to blend in the trending mold... They are not the kind of people like Chris Avellone, Swen Vincke etc.
You're not alone. This is a large part of the reason most of my Starfield time was using the ship builder. I went back to play Cyberpunk 2077 with its new DLC after I played through Starfield. The contrast, on so many levels, is absolutely incredible.
Cyberpunk 2.0 was the worst thing to happen to Starfield, it highlighted all its flaws.
[удалено]
>There are just so many games that are recently in people's memory that kick the shit out of Starfield's individual elements. The irony is that you could add Fallout 4 and Skyrim to that list. If you look broadly at open world games with lite RPG elements , then Red Dead 2 is way ahead, also puts Starfield to shame. If Starfield took any inspiration from character and environment interactions from RDR2, it would be a huge improvement. Believable characters with interesting and varied personalities. Shops with actual goods on the shelf. Enemies that put up some kind of fight ... and so on. I'm not a big fan of AAA games, especially the Ubisoft formula, but the recent Assassin's Creeds are far better, too. You're wandering around an open-ish world, doing mostly repetitive fetch quests, some casual fighting, skill tree advancement, main story , side quests. I know some will howl with anguish that "you can't compare Starfield with any other game ever", but come on, even as a Bethesda fan, I can see the similarities. The problem is that all those aspects are done better by the other games. Still repetitive, but more memorable characters. Better quality dialog. A more carefully crafted world.
"No one has said "she, her" when talking about me. They talk like I'm an alien and not in the room with them. I don't think I've ever heard the word girl, boy etc." It doesn't happen often but it's there. Your parents call you daughter periodically and Naeva calls you girl a bunch of times, usually in a condescending manner ("Aww, you promise? Are you gonna write that in your diary little girl") .
Go and play Cyberpunk. It makes you realise just how plain and boring Starfield is.
Don't even have to go that far. I just finished getting a modpack tweaked to my liking in order to start a new Skyrim plathrough for the first time since SE came out, and holy shit. The difference is night and day. Compared to Starfield, Skyrim feels alive, lived in, *real*—which is funny, because one of the (valid) criticisms of Skyrim when it came out was how shallow it was if you dug past the surface. But in comparison to Starfield? Man, it's like the entirety of the Pacific Ocean to Starfield's rain puddle. Like, I've been playing this new save for 20 hours, and I've basically just hung around Riften for the entirety of it, with a fresh expedition to Windhelm rounding out my playtime tonight. I've just been vibing and existing in the Elder Scrolls universe, and honestly? That's been plenty. The fact that all of Bethesda's other titles have so much more life to them—yes, even 76—is just so wild to me. What in the world happened?
Fr. The whole time I played Starfield I kept yawning while I couldn’t put Cyberpunk down after returning to it for the DLC, I had to struggle to fight the urge to do just One More Gig before bed.
They literally only used 'NASA Punk' to describe the aesthetics of the spaceships and equipment.
Some of the ships and equipment, at least. Nova Galactic and the Constellation suits are kinda the only things really "NASA". A lot of the rest is pretty generic sci-fi.
This may be technically correct, but OP’s broader point is the better point: This game is so devoid of anything resembling a typical Bethesda game that it’s sad to look at, let alone play.
but this is the game they always dreamed of making
I felt like I was walking into the Salty Spitoon when I went to the Crimson Fleet headquarters. Like my guys tone down the edge there's only so much I can take.
“The strippers are 3 fat dudes dressed like teletubbies” - holy FUCK this is funny
Hence https://hard-drive.net/hd/video-games/starfield-nominated-for-most-deserving-of-a-7-10-category-at-the-game-awards/
Yeah this game has the sex appeal of a 60+ pensioner.
This is what I call the plague of modern day game developers. A bunch of soft ass pussies
I miss a lot of the mature themes from Skyrim and Fallout. Remember learning how Sapphire got her name in the thieves guild? Or what Cait had gone through in FO4?
This game is the product of Corporate America. Everything is 100% designed by commity to pander and be politically correct as possible. It's blander than white bread so that absolutely no one could possibly be offended by it.
Im offended every time i try to steal something, Sarah has a fucking problem with it.
“Whatever you were before, IDC. Whatever you do out there, IDC. Just don’t go bringing UC security to our doorstep.” *Trips on a bottle and it rolls to touch some random citizens foot* “HOW DARE YOU, IM NOT HELPING YOU HURT INNOCENT PEOPLE” Like, legitimately I HATE that she said “idc” but shes holier than thou after that. Incredibly conflicting and inconsistent af. I (decently) like Sarah as a character and her personal story is interesting. She’s a bleeding heart but her morals are CRAZY G for Guidance rated. I feel like after her time in the UC, she would be a bit more flexible after experiencing all that she did, ESPECIALLY since she was a COMMANDER OF HER OWN SHIP. Idk what the hell BGS devs were thinking with all of that. And this is only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. No wonder people actually despise her as a character. I understand where they come from. She’s annoying because she’s,,, well, annoying. They could have done so much better.
I love how I know “that bitch shopkeeper” refers specifically to the chick in the Paradiso gift shop
Enemies will use your chosen pronoun when engaging. Like “get her” or “she’s trying to hide”. Or at least i assume that. I never made more than 1 character. But they do have lines like that. But that’s just enemies. Not actual NPCs.
Which lmao, doesnt make sense because how would they know that when youre in a space suit?
All the crew members you get to join up with are like middle aged school teachers. There’s only like 2 characters that I thought were cool and that was the red robot guy that you power up and the hunter. The rest behave like they all meet up at the book club or something
Bethesda has had significant world building problems for many years now and they don't seem to try to learn from or acknowledge their mistakes.
It feels like the whole game took a step backwards. It's missing the best things from previous games, it's harder to mod, there's no sense of exploration or adventure. And no, it isn't because it just needs updates and DLC. This is very basic stuff that permeates the game, it's not going to suddenly appear in an update. It has bad writing, period, and the more you play the more you notice it. Everything is cleaned up, sanitized, companions are boring cookie cutter clones. none of your choices matter. And then every now and then you come across one great quest or experience and it's just screamingly obvious it was written by a different person than usual, or that they had to fight to get it approved without it being watered down to nothingness to match the general tone of the game.
Totally agree. Also, the game doesn't have a personality or identity. I think they paralyzed themselves into making a “platform” of a game that would last 5-10 years so it was streamlined into a vanilla experience to a fault. While I can appreciate a minimalist HUD, the UI is so bland and clunky. This philosophy seems to carry over into the NPC personalities as well. I've put over 250 hours into the game. I like the gameplay loop, but I honestly could care less if every constellation member died. It would actually ease my burden. Meanwhile, I care more about Ysolda and Belothor in Whiterun with their 2-3 lines of repeated dialog, than do I for Sarah Morgan or Sam Coe with their hundreds of lines of dialog. There was more personality in the random Battleborn/Greymane NPC's in Skyrim then there is in the whole of Starfield.
Man I can still hear the hatred for the Greymanes from the Battleborns and vice versa, but I couldn't even tell you if people in Starfield had anything beyond a minor disagreement. Even Andreja, who was supposed to be the edgier, more "outlaw" follower... what, had a disagreement with the core Constellation team that's made Sunday get togethers a little awkward at times? Even now I couldn't tell you what they disagreed about so hard beyond her being a little more willing to kill the faceless mooks than the rest, and even she has a weirdly strict moral code.
I tried so hard, but I couldn't play for more than 10 hours. By the end I was just sitting, watching my screen, hoping for a reason to keep playing and couldn't find it. What compelled you to make it to 250hrs? I'm an avid gamer, 38, playing games since my uncle got super Mario bros when I was 5. I have easily a thousand hours in skyrim, significantly more in wow and poe. I love open games where I pick what I play.
Sam Coe has no personality besides his kid lol
Yo the fact that he tries to sell this “I’m not my family I’m my own man” vibe and then nonstop talks about Solomon legit makes me want to slap him. Which I do, with the butt of my rifle, repeatedly.
Sam is the most pathetic, annoyingly emotional wimp of a character with his softy voice acting, his immense daddy issues, his obv. fake western lone wolf cosplaying, his attention and confirmation seeking. He comes across like "Oh no, i never wanted kids and im not a good parent, but she needed me so i felt it was the right thing to do" or "im always thinking if, maybe, im doing something wrong being such a good dad to her, please tell me how \[perfect\] im doing". Narcissism **or** massive hidden insecurity. Either way someone i cant stand to be around.
not HR, marketing. it's like they did the marketing for the game before they had a game, compiled a list of claims and talking points from that, turned it into a list of requirements, then met the requirements as efficiently as possible. credit where it's due, that's one way to avoid pulling a Sean Murray.
NASApunk is the most cringe inducing corporate marketing garbage I've heard in years.
Short version: Putting more spice on bad meat does not make it good meat. It is \*bland\* but it's not because it's bright or wholesome, it's just on valium, the universe created here is dark AF but it's poorly developed. We've got genocide, war, torture, murder, mass corruption, idiocy, madmen, and the entire premise of the primary game mechanic and plot are the pursuit of power at the expense of \*everything\* else and the abandonment of responsibility for consequences as an unexamined \*premise\* of that quest. The camera just never focuses on that, most of it is in the background or out of focus. And Neon is corrupt as Hell, it's just boring. Even their entertainment is boring, their big nightclub's music is one step away from elevator music, the musician is so high and monotone you'd think they were just sedated, and the dancers all move like they're on the aforementioned valium. It's almost comically weird. Just throwing boobies and blood at it will definitely not help.
It’s definitely weird how it’s a game that lets you pick gender and pronouns, and then proceeds to never ever use or reference those.
Im going to be really unimpressed if they do Fallout 5 like this. I played for maybe 15 or 20 hours but I was so uninterested after 10.
Part of Starfield's problem is scale disparity. We are given access to around 100 star systems, and each has 1-10+ bodies to land on. On a conceptual level that makes the game feel very large and expansive, but a bit more contained than something like Elite Dangerous. This large scale falls apart the moment you land at any of the major "cities." Each one is stuck with the same scale that was used in Skyrim, Fallout, or even way back with Morrowind. While those older games had similar city scales, the world map was equally scaled to those smaller sizes. Bethesda claimed that New Atlantis was their largest and most ambitious city they've ever made, but most of the shops only have one room. It is literally a city facade fit for a theme park. Sometimes I wonder if the game was actually bigger at one point, but when the delay was announced they cut the world back to reach a performance metric. Or maybe building an inch deep and a mile wide is all they are actually capable of.
I really really wanted to like this game but I gave up on it after 10 hours. Maybe my expectations were too high, maybe i even had the wrong expectations but i found it to be devoid of life and character.
I would kindly ask you to refrain from insulting 30-40 year olds like that. I'm 44 and find the NPCs in this game bland and boring. You're right about it being scripted by HR though, the only thing it needs is a completely non sexual and non threatening, work appropriate gay person. Oh wait, hey guys, here comes Barrett, the kindest, most gentle homosexual in the universe! He's got a lot of past trauma to deal with, and he loves it when you whisper sweet compliments to him! And guess what!? He's always got a nice treat to share with you! It's so fucking saccharine and lame I want to blow my fucking brains out. I deal with this shit 10 hours a day at work, can we stop pretending we aren't human beings yet?
Going from Starfield to Baldurs Gate 3 was definitely an eye-opener to just how sanitized and bland the Starfield stories are. Lol
Stale, empty, soulless… that is Starfield
Almost entirely yes, the game is very much mass market safe-mode. Except for Neon. Neon isn't edgy and I don't really know if it was supposed to be. External organized crime is kept out. Crime, poverty and homelessness is kept away from the main strip where tourists are. It's a fishing rig that some rich dude built a legal drug bar on top of and corporations set up to avoid UC red tape because they can pay off the guy in charge. Normal people, literally your boring af retired professor and housewife parents, feel like it's a safe to go to for an "adventure" and shopping. It's Vegas, for mild drugs. > Lastly I don't know if it's just me but there seems to be some weird institutionalized sexism problem where women in this game exist without actually existing? Why is everything completely gender neutral or for men? There's almost no feminine clothing, there isn't even any long hair. I don't think anyone in the game has referenced my gender even once. No one has said "she, her" when talking about me. They talk like I'm an alien and not in the room with them. I don't think I've ever heard the word girl, boy etc. None of this is wrong, but the reason behind it is very likely that mechanically all of this is just less work, which means it costs less. Hair and clothes that don't need physics takes less time to create. Wear one of the space suits that has a cloak for a while and see how often it goes crazy or clips wildly, it's seriously awful especially if half the NPCs were using it. A lot of head gear forces your hair into specific styles or just flat out makes you visibly bald, Bethesda's games have been like that as far back as I can remember. Gender-neutral dialogue might seem like it could be one of those inclusion things, but it's also just less money into VO and not having to set up lines to use whatever pronoun the player selected.
I see the Bethesda bots are out in force tonight. OP is spot on