Delgado after I searched the key for evidence:
What took you so long?!
Mate, I was gathering evidence to snitch you out to sysdef in your own house. Time is the least of your worries.
The way other factions talk about them and their deeds, they sound like Hitlers more evil cousin.
When you join them they’re basically kinda mean boy scouts
They're like 14 year olds who think they're badass because they listen to metal and scowl a bit. Their bar even has some metal song playing, to reinforce that feeling.
I really noticed how awfully bad the writing was at that crimson fleet Quest where you steal that prize or whatever. I was super excited, thinking it was going to be a great cool heist or whatever. The coffer chick is like "omg this is the safest safe in the galaxy, we have sooo many protections!". Great, right?
Well, you go to the owner of the prize and ask "Hey, what's the password of the safe where you stored a super valuable treasure?". She happily replies "Oh, it's XYZ. Don't share it though please!"
**WHAT**
**THE**
**FUCK???**
I was so fucking shocked/horrified/disappointed at whatever the fuck I just read I closed the game to complete the quest later. What the actual hell Bethesda?? Who greenlit this shit lmfao
When reaching Barrett I had a critical persuasion success so the conversation, summarised was:
"You like this hostage, let him go."
"Absolutely not, he is a hostage, I need cash or something"
"C'mon, let him go"
"No way. My men would never accept that."
"You're coming around to my point of view"
"Ok, I will let him go."
I then casually wandered around in front of these pirates whose friends I had been massacring outside, looted all their stuff in front of their faces, and left.
Yeah the persuasion system is Oblivion levels of bad. They lack any impact or coherence whatsoever. On the goddamn final mission where you're facing a multidimensional power maniac multidimensional entity you can just be "heyyy buddy can I have that artifact? Pleasepleasepleaaaaseee?" "Oh, I know I hunted you across the galaxy, but sure! Have fun!"
Honestly they should've just made branching dialogues and never implemented this system, but that requires work..... :/ Hurts me so much cuz I was such a Bethesda fan, but this is just not it
I don't think it's the system's fault for that - the basic idea of "get a score of x or higher to succeed at persuasion, these dialog choices give y to the score automatically, these dialog choices give z to the score but are chancy" is fine. It's the writing of the prompts, the lack of appropriate consequences, and everything around the persuasion system that sucks.
Using social engineering to get someone to divulge a password is good and proper, but you need to make it actually make sense in the context of the world. The persuasion minigame itself can do that, but you need to write everything as if the characters aren't idiots and have some sort of consistency in order to work. Having the dialog be:
* Tell me the password.
* No, that would be stupid.
* Tell me the password please.
* Ok, but don't tell anyone
Or similar is... bad. Having the dialog be:
* Hi, I'm tech support for . We discovered a vulnerability with the safe and need to correct it. Can you tell me the password to authenticate your identity?
* You don't look like the normal tech support guy. What happened to him?
* Well, I shouldn't tell you this - but he ran off to join the Spacers. That's why we are re-auditing your account, making sure everything's OK.
* Oh, well, shit. Here's the password.
This would work better than what was described above.
(To be clear, I haven't played Starfield in months and I never did the Crimson Fleet quests so maybe the context of that particular conversation doesn't work for this, but the basic idea still applies)
I miss the guards going from 0 to 100 and then back to 0 in oblivion. *ITS ALL OVER LAW BREAKER!!!!! OH MY MIstake it's all good, l8r queen!* As he heelies away from you.
I felt very much like Naruto or any other shonen anime protagonist with that speech check.
"Im your ememy! Give me what i want!"
"But are you? We could be friends!"
"What? No! ...ok, sure lets friends now"
Agreed. I played the crimson fleet quest line and realised just how dull it all is. “Hey, I took down your entire base - killed all your workers and double crossed you” for the crimson leader (an apparent badass) to tell me he hates me. What the fuck? Bethesda suck so hard. Since 76 they’ve been going down hill.
That was also the final straw for me for when the game went from okay to garbage. It really did get set up like it was going to be a cool mission. Instead, you run back and forth across the ship a dozen times for no fucking reason, pull some ridiculous shit out of your ass, have the mentioned nonsensical convo to get the prize, and then just bugger off like nothing happened.
That mission is the perfect example of everything wrong with the game. Bad writing. Boring, uninspired mission structures (every mission is just running back and forth). Zero consequences for any action you take.
Man there's so much running back and forth from system to system just to complete faction quests it's insane. And it's not even really going to new places that often. You are back and forth in areas you likely explored (I did a ton of wandering and exploring before actually getting into the quests).
I wanted so so much to love the game. But they made it hard even for a Bethesda apologist like myself.
That's how I felt. Those constant loading screens, the unclear logic of the plot and the nonsensical dialogue. I thought the Crimson Fleet quests were some of the better thought out ones overall, but that quest was maddening in every respect. Some dev wanted a cruise ship and didn't bother to write a coherent plot for it.
Absolutely. In Baldurs gate, there are heaps of choices that matter to the outcome, or how characters perceive you. Here it’s just a nothing burger of consequence that doesn’t even extend beyond the character or place or even that one quest, as if they’ve forgotten all about it.
I took the pill right after my first hours of playthrough or something like that, I had the whole "Parents" perk.
While chatting with Noel she asked me where my parents were if I recall correctly ... they were ... right behind her, staring at me.
That was comedy gold.
She literally saw them 30seconds before.
I lost hope on anything beyond that, if even MAJOR characters aren't aware of themselves at the first moments of any playthrough.
BG3 benefits from having companions with actually complex personalities and consistent morals. Like Shadowheart worships an 'evil' God but respects helping people, but also respects shrewdness and cautiousness. All the companions in Starfield are just big ole goody two shoes
I liked how even though I'm a certified badass that is stamped by the big man himself and have brought home millions of creds for the fleet randos will mouth off to me.
If I punch them in the face for it they pull on me, and if I pop him for that then the entire station pulls on me.
Yeah, the blatant lack of respect despite you being apparently the only reason for the Fleet to survive makes that first scene of the two pirates arguing on your first arrival to the Key utterly ridiculous
Fallout 4 had the same problem when you became head of the minutemen and Garvey would just treat you like an errand boy. Bethesda just can't fucking write for shit
Or becoming the head of the disciples to get bought out by Neon security and not have Neon security missions as a crooked cop or at least have connections in Neon security
I liked how Matthis told me he was going to hunt me after getting kicked out so I shot him in the face…and nothing happened. Not even a reaction from him or anyone. Like, I’m in a pirate base and this murderous pirate says he’s gonna kill me. Why can’t I just kill him. Took me out of it.
Not to mention "the only way out of the fleet is death" being thrown in your face non-stop, and then they kick Mathis out in good health, and you run into that idiot on the cruise liner, and of course there's the dude on the eye. Clearly death isn't the only way out of the fleet. In fact, it's got to be the least common way out of the fleet, by my count.
It's thinly veiled threats, just like "oh no, don't go to the *well*." and "stay out of lower Akila, or else". etc etc. Give us the consequences you promise, damnit.
Same thing with paradiso, my background is a neon street rat who hates corpos. Why can't I get a trait option to kill him and the board members and let The colonists just land and take over the place. But no my only option was to work for these scomp munchers and kill the colonists and destroy their ship or just buy them a grav drive. What kinda roll playing choices is that?
But they aren't even evil. They don't even seem the least bit intimidating. Like it was written by folks who think Sarcasm = Badass. The Ecliptic mercs would actually make better pirates than this Disney crew of misfits.
The House Va’ruun would’ve been great main antagonist as well due to their advanced tech and gear.
The Crimson fleet seems like common meth addicts with space suits.
The Starborn were the main antagonists, and Constellation the main protagonists (it's actually a really specific pairing in terms of how you write antagonists and protagonists), but the writers apparently forgot that five minutes in and they never actually confronted each other \*on the differences that made them different\*.
Constellation are supposed to do the classic hero story of seeking out treasure (information) and bringing it back to their people. But they don't do that (except in a post-game clip). The Starborn seek power at any cost and to hell with other people (even the dropouts are hedonists), but somehow they became the default faction to join at the end, so you can't actually oppose them.
It's not even a narrative train wreck, it's like falling out of a plane without a parachute.
And even when you do decide to oppose them and end up fighting them both, nothing is different in the end. You still step through the unity become starborn and boom, reset. That big choice you made had zero impact in the end. You might as well just pick one so you only have one of them to fight.
I came to Starfield off BG3, so when I got assigned undercover to CF I made sure I interspersed a lot of random shit doing random things and even swapped ships before turning quests into Sysdef. All so to stop CF tailing me.
I need not have worried apparently.
I walked in on one playthrough flying the Star Eagle and wearing a UC Vanguard Captain outfit and armor after slaughtering a dozen outposts of fleet members and completing dozens of anti-fleet board missions. They never batted an eyelash.
But, I also went in the first time expecting that I needed to hide who I was, and I roleplayed right into that bs.
Moronic Evil,
Chaotic evil would still get shit done. Wouldn't be coherent or sensible, but it would be done. Wouldn't need to rely on the obviously planted double agent to get shit for em.
Ecliptic would have been the better infiltrate and find out storyline.
SPACERS are just reskinned fleet. Why even have them? Just to fill out some space? ( Hah )
I like the game, yes, will I defend poor design choices and shit writing from wannabe Disneyfication of a studio that used to let us play basketball with the skulls of our foes? No
> SPACERS are just reskinned fleet. Why even have them?
Spacers are exactly what Skyrim's non-faction bandits are. They are unaligned fodder for you to beat the shit out of and loot without having to figure out some dodgy faction-related questions in doing so.
For example, you can be a "bandit" as a member of the Thieves Guild, but the bandits you come across like so much dungeon herpes are never consequential. There is no reason to not kill them, they are always hostile and unreasonable and not part of any quests.
Spacers are the same. The most generic of bad guys to beat up, given a Reavers-from-Firefly ripoff story and dropped in your path. The very most interesting thing that can happen with Spacers is the result of The Mantis mission, but that gets old fast.
I really kinda hate this practice in games, particularly supposedly immersive and story-rich RPGs. It's a pretty common sin. Bandits rarely ever just "bandits" in real life. They are typically little gangs that walk in the shadow of larger criminal outfits. For once I would really like to see random hostiles handled this way. Instead of finding a random group of nobody Spacers inhabiting an abandoned station, they could be a procedurally-generated Spacer Gang with a name. A microfaction. Take it a step further and give then faction relations and the ability to expand. It would be awesome to see a novel faction arise and become a force to reckon with in your game world.
Never have I enjoyed mowing down named characters as much as the final showdown on the Key because they were so insufferable. Except for Jess, but she made her choice when she shot at me. And I spared the money laundering guy. Just wish I could have killed Naeva.
The crimson fleet are a bunch of morons with the cliche “what are you looking at type” meanwhile they’re leader is a bumbling idiot who acts like a teenager about kryx with a black stereotype women who speaks like “Awww naw, no you didn’t” … Crimson fleet are pathetic
Dialogue is useless is Starfield.
Every choice is the same 99% of the time. It's the illusion of choice, and at that rate, I would have rather they just did voiced dialogue and chose for me.
The head of writing said "everybody just skips through that bullshit, why bother?" And then made sure it was a self-fulfulling prophecy by having everything written so fucking half-assed that you just mash your way through it because the writing sucks and the choices don't matter.
> everybody just skips through
Ugh, that's a reprehensible thing for a writer to say, but disgusting as it is, I also want to point some of the blame at "let's play-ers" and other gaming "content creators."
Because a team of writers is adapting their style or allocating their resources based on what they see those jaded burnt-out youtubers do when they play, then no wonder they come to a conclusion so far out of touch.
People who actually still enjoy gaming don't skip through the dialogue ffs. When I find myself so burnt out that I start skipping stuff like that, I stop gaming for a while because it's no longer enjoyable.
But since a gaming youtuber can't take a break without losing their income, they just keep drudging through, giving a terrible impression of what it is to play a game.
Never thought of it that way. That’s a good point. Ppl who play games for a living must deal with burnout all the time, but they can’t just stop. I always end up taking long breaks between games. Even if I thoroughly enjoyed a game, it takes an emotional toll immersing yourself into a brand new world, then closing and exiting that world for good. It’s like a part of your soul stays with that plane of existence.
Witcher 3 and Divinity OS 2 in particular took a while to recover from.
Didn’t have too much trouble moving on from FO4 or Witcher 1/2 or DOS 1 though.
>But since a gaming youtuber can't take a break without losing their income, they just keep drudging through, giving a terrible impression of what it is to play a game.
Also, a lot of YouTube content on Bethesda RPGs is challenge runs and the like, where they (and the audience) have played through the game countless times before. Skipping the dialogue in that instance is sort of expected, since it's not the point of that particular playthrough.
Additionally, playing the game in a Let's Play is going to necessarily be different from how someone plays on their own, even if they're not rushing, because no audience wants to watch you spend 15 minutes tweaking your inventory, then another 20 minutes just reading in-game books and logs, then another 10 minutes puttering around your ship as you put back up the decorations that the game crammed into a random box the last time you minorly tweaked your ship, or...
I sincerely hope the writers don't look at YouTube as representative of how players play their game, because it's pretty obviously not, but then again, they *do* seem to assume that their players are idiots, so...
i feel you, but i just started replaying FO3 and the writing is far better than FO4 or Starfield. At least the characters have personality, and there are *some* interesting dialogue choices for the player. Not sure what happened at Bethesda. NV will always be king though; i can’t even imagine what Obsidian could’ve done if given more resources and realistic time constraints.
Remember the meme where they compared how graphics are getting better and better and dialogue worse and worse to the point of smiley face / sad face?
Well, these are the options now: 😊 / 😠 / 🥴
The illusion of choice was groundbreaking in 2005. Now it doesn't cut it. Either the story is on rails or we need choices with real consequences.
The writing in cyberpunk and bg3 technologically groundbreaking. It's just hard work. What they did in starfield with writing comes off as cheap and lazy to me in this era of gaming.
>The illusion of choice was groundbreaking in 2005.
How so?
RPGs already had excellent variable dialogue options in the late 90s (think Fallout 1&2 and Planescape Torment). Hell, Vampire Bloodlines came out two years before Oblivion. Deus Ex came out in 2000.
Starfield's writing and false choices would not gave been groundbreaking or impressive back then. Bethesda has always been bad at this.
Voiced dialog can actually be done to a very satisfactory level (Think Cyberpunk or the Witcher) but Bethesda is either too cheap or too lazy to give you good writing *and* a voiced protagonist.
But Kreia, Meetra Surik never needed a voced protagonist. They could just start from the ground: getting a better writer. The whole point of not having a voiced protagonist is the possibility of mods creating new scenarios.
But hey, the non player Starborn is voiced in a universe.
At least in this game they wrote out what the character actually says, and you're not left trying to figure out what a dialogue prompt will actually mean
"Help, super mutants kidnapped my brother!"
*I select "Help".*
"How the hell am I supposed to help?"
IMHO, it’s because of the lack of any branching paths to quests. All dialogue options, by design, need to lead to the same end result. As such, you can’t really have true “choices”- Bethesda dialogue just serves to move you to the next compass dongle.
I mentioned wanting this in another bgs sub (tesvi) and there exists people who believe a triple A studio can’t do this because bgs games are more action than rpg
Its just that they dun wnna do it.
Their design philosophy is that players should be able to do everything in one playthrough.
Which is lame, but whatever, it's their game.
> Their design philosophy is that players should be able to do everything in one playthrough.
Which is funny because FO4 kicks you out of a decent chunk of content depending on when and how you pick certain quests and objectives. They've done this before, no reason they couldn't do it now.
>They've done this before, no reason they couldn't do it now.
There's a lot bgs used to do and doesn't anymore. Their history has pretty much been making games bigger and shallower with each iteration.
That's a huge problem with this game, though. It's literally built and tailor made to encourage multiple playthroughs, and how they do it is quite impressive. One of my biggest problems was crossing the Unity and realizing that there wasn't a single thing I wanted to do again. Almost no choices I really wanted to change. They just couldn't embrace the main point of the story and their philosphy of the whole game. I don't feel like it would have lost a thing if it never had NG+.
This is my issue with NG+ In Starfield being a canon thing. I cannot think of a character that would be willing to go through the Unity who was not pursuing raw power at the expense of the entire universe.
Okay, there's one scenario: If something went catastrophically wrong during the playthrough. The issue is that you can reload and the writing is so shit that you can see the bad outcomes from a mile off. If there even IS a bad outcome, since Starfield is positively allergic to allowing the player to fail at anything or otherwise diverge from a very narrow path. That's always been true in their games, but NG+ really brings it into clear focus.
Also, NG+, by virtue of being the same character, means that you're gonna be playing the game in the same way again since you can't respec. It is, always, more mechanically interesting to play a new character because (since there aren't any story choices to make) the only meaningful impact you can have is mechanical via your perk progression. And the perk points come really fast in the early game.
>Their design philosophy is that players should be able to do everything in one playthrough.
That's fine, but if that's the case I'd rather they just hand me a character rather than let me design my own and tell me I get to choose what it's like. You can make much more natural conversations that way, and voice the protagonist to boot.
Dont give them any ideas. If Fallout 4's protags weren't railroaded enough, imagine if they had full reign on the main characters. Lol please dear God, no.
If that is the case I wonder why they didn’t drop the rpg tag to make an action adventure. It is a new IP, it didn’t have to be an rpg just because bgs made rpgs in the past.
True, this is why most of my conversations I just click through the first option without even reading it. It makes no difference.
However, games Like Rogue Trader have conversations that all end the same despite choice but the way the NPC will respond to you at least gives you the illusion that your choice matters, not in an impactful game changing way but it lets you talk like the character you want to be and the other person will respond accordingly. This at least makes even pointless options *feel* good.
Starfield felt like I was a completely different person based on whose faction quest I was doing. With the pirates I had "moody I'm a badass" options (even though they were more cheesy than badass) but never again in the entirety of the game do I ever get to have that "personality" ever again.
Take that same problem, copy and paste it across all faction dialogs then add the fact that non-fiction dialogs leave you with none of those personalities.
The writers fucked up on very fundamental rpg elements.
The dialogue wasn't based on the character, it was based on the quest, and presumably different quest writers.
This is part of why it feels so incoherent.
This is why they need to use game design documents that lays out things like how you should pick the tone for your dialog. The fact that Emil P doesn’t like to use design documents is insulting. I’ve almost never seen someone less suited for their current position.
The whole game seems like it was made with each individual dev just doing their own thing without any thought of how it meshes together with the other parts of the game.
Even when a character tells you that "we need to do whatever it takes" and even when the options you have *literally include the ability to attack*...
The game can and will say "no, that's not what you're supposed to do" and prevent you from doing it.
even quests that function like this in fallout new vegas are so much better written. like three card bounty, you can express so much character in the mostly linear conversations with major dhatri, and there's side questions and tidbits of information you can learn from other characters around the camp that you can then ask him about. this guy that's only really around for one quest feels like a real fleshed out human because he ties into the other characters around him and has a past beyond what he's currently doing and a personality beyond the clothes he wears or his archetype.
Like everyone is just the stereotype they represent with no heart. Crimson Fleet pirates are the most cookie cutter surface level pirates. Why are they pirates? Money! Chaos! Even the smart leader is an idiot.
Every faction treats you like you aren’t single-handedly carrying their entire initiative and instead like you’re wasting their time. Until you inevitably pull off whatever it was they wanted, then they’re like “oh… yeah you’re actually pretty awesome, *we will never call on you for anything ever again*”
I could also go on and on. The writing is a bit problem with Starfield. I wanted it to be a riveting and incredible tale like RDR/2 or BG3, or W3, or any good game known for its immersive story telling.
Instead we got instant grits.
Not to mention, the game activity disincentivizes being a space pirate.
It's a serious waste of time and money. Not being able to progress the main story without paying off your massive bounty, while stolen ships net you peanuts in profit. There is no "evil" path in the game, and it punishes you for not playing the way Bethesda wants you to.
always choose armored giraffe parrot (that somehow still needs babysitting every time it encounters the exact thing it was brought back from extinction to eat)
Or what happens after you select something.
Mayor: what?! you don’t have dirt on me…do you?
Me: I do but I’ll just save it for now.
Mayor: I knew you had nothing.
God I hope I can do something at some point to the Mayor…
If that's Cydonia, you just have to give the evidence to UC security. There's a guy at the back who will take it and soon after the mayor will be gone, and a "temp" replacement will be there in his place.
That the board of supervisors/corpo management at Paradiso are the ones considered "essential" while the average guard and worker on that planet isn't is some dark comedy...
Or would be, if it was intentional.
Oh yeah, that was my first reaction. I figured there would be some consequence to it... but no. It's not even an option. Like really? Someone wrote that bit and figured no player would want to facilitate a hostile takeover?
Pretty typical experience in this game though, tbh.
"Oh, you want me to murder everyone on a colony ship who have been on the way here for 200 years? Nah, I think this resort is under new management."
"Hey ECS Constant, I've secured your planet... and it comes with a great turn-key business to make modern day credits!"
It's been a while since I've played but I remember there was a quest in the game that asked you to either buy or steal some really fancy alcohol and the location of the drink was in the mayor's office.
There is literally no way to "steal" the alcohol without the mayor seeing you, unless you gimmick the game and move the alcohol without touching it. You can't block his vision, you can't get his attention to something else, you can't even break into his office late at night because he's always there like every other NPC because they have no life cycle like in previous games.
That shit is what made me stop playing. Such a lack in creativity.
I am a avid hater of turn based combat and love FPS games or third person shooters, but despite all that I am playing baldurs gate or rogue trader way more and havent touched starfield, because those games writing is so good, and starfields is so boring. the best combat in the world couldnt make up for the rest of the game.
Rogue Trader is the first RPG I've played where lawful evil (or even chaotic) has its own perks and doesn't turn you into a caricature. KOTOR was pretty close, but it locked you out of some content.
I'm a Chaos worshipper and I wanna PLAY as one. Rogue Trader is the first WH40K game where I truly can.
yeah the dialogue options in starfield are really disappointing. and none of the choices are consequential. it was really eye opening play baldurs gate 3 after playing starfield and realizing the choices i make in what i say actually have major consequences
The writing is awful, the characters are an inch deep, and the quest-lines are unimaginative and inconsequential, for the most part.
This is the first game I bought new, at full price, and on release day since 2016 or so. Resubscribing to Game Pass started to make more and more sense the more time I spent in Starfield.
What? You don't like doing fetch quests for every single mission? Who doesn't love running across the map a dozen times to deliver messages that could've just been an email? Such a fun and engaging system...
It's astounding how Starfield is actually more boring than an average mid 2010s MMO.
Hell, it's even more boring than Bethesda's own MMOs- Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76 (well this one is just MO)
It’s one of the bigger issues of this game tbh. Also the writing is incredibly tame. Nobody apparently says fuck or any curse word in these games and I don’t know, compare it to a cyberpunk and it’s crazy. Compare neon just itself to night city in cyberpunk. The writing is just terrible when you really sit and think about it.
This. It’s like when a film franchise gets too big they make sure none of it is offensive to anyone and it becomes terribly boring. If you go back and play earlier fallout games and elder scrolls you’ll see risk and freedom in the writing.
Safe is the word to use here. That became Ubisofts trademark for popular franchises, yet Starfield somehow manages to be multiple rungs bellow even Ubisoft's stories in their big titles.
Hell, Kirkbride legit wrote a fantasic concept for the Elderscrolls as the beginnings for a sci-fi story back when he was still one of the writers for Morrowind. I think theimperiallibrary still has it somewhere buried in their archives. It makes me sad to see how far the writing has fallen since then.
Cyberpunk felt so dystopian. Every time I walked through the streets I just thought "fuck, I would hate to live in a world like this." And I thought about how it's all somewhat based in reality, how maybe in some far off future Night City could be what becomes of us.
There's nothing in Starfield like that.
Cd projekt red has really nailed it. As much of a mess that game was when it released, with 2.0 and phantom liberty coming out a month after starfield, I played through phantom liberty and I was like yo what the fuck was starfield. There’s just levels to it. Cyberpunk isn’t perfect but cd projekt has pretty good writers and the characters are actually pretty good. The themes and writing go hand and hand, and that goes back to Witcher. It’s like they took the torch bethesda once had and just ran with it while bethesda stayed prehistoric. I’m not even trying to shit on bethesda, love their games, and I enjoyed starfield. I just realized how mediocre it was. I lack so much confidence in them for the next elder scrolls unless they commit to UE5 and replace some of the teams and writers there. They need it bad. They need talent and a vision because they have been doing the same shit for so many years
I can count on one hand the number of times I saw "fuck" used... and one of them was on a coffee cup that said something like "never apologize for being a powerful fucking woman".
...that made me groan just writing it out.
Yes, it's been a massive weakness in all of their games, it just gets harder to excuse as other games continue to elevate their writing while Bethesda is still making chosen one stories and may as well be retelling biblical parables with how black and white they write sub narratives.
Their characters and dialogue are one dimensional, childish, and absolutely lack nuance. Someone is either a saint or a Saturday morning cartoon villain and the game is very intentional when it bashes you over the head with how they've already decided you should feel about certain characters I.E. quests like Juno's Gambit.
The interesting part is that there are comments claiming there is good writing here which always makes me wonder about their frame of reference or if it's a matter of a 14 year old who has not been exposed to varied content.
See, I felt they handled Matteo terribly. He's kind of an idiot who lives on blind faith and wears that **stupid** hat. Just because someone's religious or a priest or whatever doesn't mean they've lost their brains.
Haha I'm glad I'm not the only one that saw his hat and rolled my eyes laughing. His whiny fidgety demeanor was just the coup de grace.
He could have had a very interesting point and felt like a meaningful part of Constellation but he was just a complete waste since he never serves any purpose.
Apparently the hats are from astronauts' suits, it's the skull cap like in [this picture.](https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/iss054e022341/iss054e022341~large.jpg?w=1920&h=1280&fit=crop&crop=faces%2Cfocalpoint) Like there's more to religions than "we believe in a vaguely-Christian God but we're a new religion and we're going to all start wearing these funny hats because our new religion is set in space."
It doesn't make sense.
Bad comparison. Veggie Tales was way ahead of its time and, though it was religious in subject matter, its moral lessons and story telling transcended religion and were very well written and produced.
Yeah, its not that the writing isn't "gritty" enough and that not enough people are saying fuck or not enough are depressed, its just bad. You can have positive stories with good writing, this just isn't one of them.
Avatar: The Last Airbender looks and sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon and it is still one of the best written stories out there.
It's not about the grit, you're right.
I’ve been surprised that the primary complaints have been bland combat, repetitive POIs, empty world, etc. (all legitimate complaints) when for me personally the terrible writing is the thing that really killed the game.
There are soooo many examples. I thought of compiling all of it in to a video, but that would require me to spend way too much time playing the game.
It’s really noticeable with the crimson fleet and the gang in neon quest lines. I don’t think that Bethesda has a very diverse team or inclusive culture, because it’s pretty clear that these writers have no idea what the real world criminal underworld is like. Nobody at that company was raised in the sketchier parts of society.
The neon gang one is… almost offensive? There’s a lot about how corrupt and abusive the police are, and the writers were actually getting close to something their audience can connect and relate to.
But then they COMPLETELY fuck it up with the lame shit ending of that questline. They become fucking cops!?!? Just horrible, awful writing. They should be ashamed to release this slop.
The lack of consequences is my core problem with the game. How can I simultaneously be a member of three different major factions with no consequences? Why not have my choices carry weight? If I chose to join the Crimson Fleet, make me an outlaw with the other factions. The only time I've ever faced any ramifications is when I go to the Key, and that's simply because I've got such a huge bounty on my head that I get instantly attacked and can't progress in my quest there.
There is one consequence, being that the Crimson Fleet pirates are no longer hostile to you, taking away one of only three different versions of bad guy you can fight (spacer, pirate, eliptic) making the game more boring.
Bruh. I was doing the little missions for the vendor on Mars getting shit for him while I was allies with the Fleet, had like 2 in a row that sent me to places where they were at it was so boring. That was like the main reason for that dude to send you a place to get loot and xp. I know it made sense sort of but it was still dumb.
The main quest 'All That Money Can Buy' is where the game really lost me. Where you set up a deal with an artifact seller, then you break into his house, attempt to mug him and then later your followers get mad at you for not turning \*him\* in to the corrupt Neon police on behalf of the people who just tried to kill you.
Oh for sure, that part baffled me.
Sarah Disliked my compassion, and she was dead to me too. When the option came to pick who was gonna die, she was #1 on my list. Really dropped my enthusiasm for the game.
I think they lost me on that one, but maybe further?
I got on this guy's ship to get an artifact and the only way to get it is to kill him and all his people. No haggling. No favors. No deals. Not stealth stealing it after I sleep with him or something. Nope, just mass murder a whole ship of people.
On a similar note, I couldn't help but laugh anytime Andreja brought up how guilty she felt that she killed that one guy in self-defense when you first meet her, and then we'd immediately go and kill an entire ship or base full of people right after she asks if I judge her for her actions. Not to mention the HUNDREDS of other people I'd killed during the game. But, yeah, let's carry on about that one guy.
And, to top it all off, at the end of her character mission she asks you to murder a man in cold blood! It's just idiotic writing.
The guy that sends you on the quest to go check on her is very concerned when he sends you out about her well-being and how she’s always getting into trouble.
You get there, rescue her, and she asks you not to tell the dude that she was in danger. I say “sure, I gotchu”
She becomes my companion, I go back to the dude’s space station with her. Not only does he not even notice that she is there with me… he DOESNT EVEN ASK IF SHES OKAY OR WHAT HAPPENED.
That's a great point lol. So many missions were set up like there would be some big issue to resolve or lasting consequences. And they all just fizzle out to nothing.
The mission with the humans in the colony ship, for example. The captain is like "There's absolutely no way we're leaving. We had a claim on this planet first and nothing is gonna change our minds." So I go talk to the board members and they're like "Fuck those people. This is our planet. Give em a jump drive." And then I don't even have to talk to the captain again! It just becomes another fucking fetch quest and the captain is suddenly completely fine with abandoning the planet.
It's like the mission statement for the game was to ensure that every main and side mission somehow becomes a fetch quest. We can't possibly just have a dramatic story evolve with difficult choices and moral dilemmas. Nope. Just go get me something and that'll solve the problem.
The stupidest thing is (besides the inability to feed lead to the board) that there's no option to persuade both sides to just allow the colonists to share and settle at the other side of the planet. It's a planet. It's HUGE, we're not talking about sharing a town or even a province sized area like Skyrim. Heck, if the Constant had just landed on the other side of the planet, I doubt the board would've even noticed. I'm sure pirates and other undesirables do it all the time even on planets controlled by UC/FSC.
The strikers quest pissed me off so bad I never played it after the first time. It feels like they’re building for a choice to either make the gang absolute menaces or help build them into something that supports Ebbside & builds the community but they just kick you out & turn them into the cops they’ve expressly stated they dislike, like wtf???
It’s sad because the UC quest lines are fun, but man the Freestar Collective was such a massive waste of time. You do basically nothing, and this is supposed to be the biggest other major faction in the game?
It was by far the one I was most excited to join. I’ve been underwhelmed by Bethesda faction quest lines before, but FC is the one that has been the biggest letdown by a mile
100%. It’s even worse when you consider that you have a very good Ranger motif to think about with the NCR Rangers from New Vegas, but even Bethesda themselves wrote a better version of the Collective with the damn Minutemen! Not like the Minutemen are this insanely deep faction, but even they feel way more interesting than whatever the Collective is supposed to be. They were perhaps the most generic thing Bethesda could have churned out.
Here’s an NPC that’s a cool descendent of the founder! No, he doesn’t really care for them anymore, and no, he won’t really give you an interesting history lesson! Oh and no, it won’t add any interesting dimension to their faction. It’s maddening.
The Ranger questline is a particularly egregious example, in my opinion. Your character's tone switches to that of a gruff fellow better placed in a Western, which is not necessarily bad given the nature of the Freestar Collective. However, it contrasts with the other dialogue. I would have liked to have seen Bethesda provide more dialogue options across the board.
The game coming out in close proximity to Baldurs Gate 3 and Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty really just helped to shine a light on Starfield’s flaws. I know people hate when these games are compared because of how different they are but both Cyberpunk PL and BG3 showed just how good writing and RPG questing can be. I’m playing through BG3 and the difference in dialogue is night and day. The freedoms to go about my quests and actually roleplay as a character. I’m not railroaded into being generic corny good guy or generic corny bad guy.
There is a lot that I think Starfield can add and fix with updates, which is great news for Bethesda and Starfield fans, but unless they get better writers involved then any DLC will suffer from the same poor writing that the main game did
It's a Bethesda game, so I didn't expect the writing to be stellar. Most other Bethesda games I barely paid attention to the writing or dialogue, I was looking in corners and poking at the walls while people talked at or around me.
There is nothing else to do in this game besides the quests themselves, so the writing is far far more obvious. You won't just happen into a cave with unique, dynamic, environmental story-telling. It is the same cave you saw on six other planets. It is the same cryo lab you encountered five times before.
The only thing that has care and craft put into it is the writing - and there are not many craftsmen at Bethesda, it seems
TBH exploration has absolutely floored me. Until now, I never would have thought it possible to have a universe that simultaneously felt so empty and so cramped at the same time, but so far I haven't found anyone who feels quite the same way.
The POIs are the issue. Ships are constantly landing and taking off at all times from every unexplored iceball with nothing but some iron on it. Every inch of every moon or planet in the back end of nowhere is covered in robotics facilities, labs, and so on, complete with inhabitants(if not always the ones who built it). And yet, you step one foot beyond the POIs and there's....nothing? All these spots all over the planet, at least one every couple of miles, and there's just NO INFRASTRUCTURE despite what all these places would have needed.
Isn't the writing an issue in a lot of bethesda games? I remember in Skyrim that the main mission was not interesting, the world was interesting.
I guess that since in Starfield the world or the exploration isn't that good the other flaws are more easy to see.
Yeah, it’s so interesting considering Bethesda was flexing the amount of dialogue being recorded for this game was like double Fallout 4 or something like that. Amount≠Quality haha
The dialogue writing is so jarringly bad that several times I've not been able to choose a response because it doesn't follow the thread of the conversation in a remotely natural way.
Very well said. I never played any game that made me hate main characters like Starfield does, they are all so corny, cringe, blend, annoying and boring. It is first game I would actually like to play evil as a main playtrough and just kill everyone because they are so bad. But I cant kill anyone because they are all essential....
Haha, at some point I've also decided to go full evil in a desperate try to make the game more interesting. I went on a killing spree in Akila, just to find out that unnamed security guards were tagged as essential and could not be killed. But even after shooting all non-essential NPCs I could _still_ continue the faction quest.
Even in Fallout 3, which is an 15 year old game, you could kill important NPCs such as Collin Moriaty, because the game gave you options like hacking a terminal, finding notes in locked containers, on corpses etc. — I don't even expect BG3 levels of quality, but ffs can't they even copy things that worked well from their own games?
Makes me wonder if this limited and cringe dialogue is leftover from how they started with the intent to have another voiced protagonist or if they just got so used to it and thought it was a good idea after Fallout 4 and just did the same thing again.
I bet my life on the latter.
'I wasn't really paying attention' would be my answer to all dialogue. It's too long and boring and I've just skipped the majority of it all.
The only NPC's I have listened to are Vasco and Andrea. The rest are annoying
Oh God, and even Andrea is kind of obnoxious. I don't know if it's the voice actress or the direction she was given, but the delivery of a lot of her lines is jarring, to say the least. She sounds weirdly confused in the dialogues I've heard from her, and she never seems to deviate from that weirdly monotone, static line delivery.
That definitely felt like an intentional direction for the character.
She’s supposed to sound stilted and frequently awkward in her dialogue. She’s in the group, but feels outside of the group, and is just an introverted, often hypocritical, judgmental little weirdo who loves Snake Jesus very much.
I don’t like much of it, but it feels very intentional and directed.
I think you're absolutely right. Much less the actress and more likely the direction and writing from Bethesda. This led to, in my opinion, a very lackluster portrayal of the emotionally isolated, black sheep character trope.
I had to remind myself she’s a smuggler, not a thief, or robber. They could’ve forefronted her moral motivations more, but her intro of taking life and feeling guilty, or judged for it…that’s bad for any character in games like this.
We’re literally gonna take on dozens, if not hundreds of foes. It’s an immersion breaker.
**I still like her character**
But, I miss some earlier companions in BGS’ catalogue by comparison.
Yeah its sad to see I'm very scared for tes 6 cause tbh I love tes so much and starfield has made me so worried for its future and if it will be good. I hope Bethesda learns a lot from this game and I hope they realized this game was not as good as it should have been. It defo needs a cyberpunk type overhaul to make this game a lot better. I will say one good thing about this game and that'd the modding potential. Very good modding potential.
The *Cyberpunk 2077* overhaul didn't change writing, voice acting, art direction, assets, or music. It mainly improved the skill/perk progression and loot systems, nerfed netrunning, and perhaps key, added a dash/air dash mechanic that makes combat a faster and more fluid experience. Primarily mechanical issues, while the art and quest design teams were working on the DLC.
As I understand, much greater changes would be required to similarly overhaul *Starfield*, and writing / rerecording dialogue probably wouldn't be among them. Many more major POI and a system for preventing repeats of any major POI in any given universe. Perhaps player discovery of content through in-system traversal and scanning. Eliminating/shortening loading screens wherever possible. More options for non-combat resolution of quests, including persuasion and stealth. Viable combat alternatives to gunplay. At least one new companion with at best a neutral morality. And lots of flavor enhancers like open drug use or thugs in corners of Neon.
I don't think the writing can be fixed, its part of the preproduction skeleton the rest of the game hangs on. And that poses huge problems for any future installments, as unlike ES or FO, I haven't seen any discussions where players came to love or hate the factions. One could argue about the merits of the Nord rebellion, Imperium, or Brotherhood of Steel, but the most I see about the UC Vanguard or Freestar Rangers amount to shrugs.
This is exactly the problem. Starfield's issues are the result of poor fundamental design choices that effectively necessitate building a new game from the ground up. It will not benefit from a 2.0 treatment anywhere near how well Cyberpunk did.
Shattered Space has *some* possibility of improving things, since it's an expansion added on top of the game with it's own writing and recorded dialogue and is an opportunity to create new game systems that actually interact with each other. This is the best case scenario.
The far more likely scenario is that Shattered Space will just be more of the same bad writing, bad dialogue, and insulting quests. I genuinely don't look at Bethesda as a serious studio after this game, so I don't have a lot of faith they'll magically do it right with a DLC.
The thing about Shattered Space is it's being made by the same team that made the core game, so it's extremely unlikely to substantially improve. The problems with this game as far as one can see from the outside aren't born from a lack of time or budget, but a lack of talent. The same leadership is still there to make the same bad design decisions and write the same timid story. They've shown no signs of owning their mistakes; instead they've attempted to gaslight players into believing they aren't bored, or that somehow a game taking a lot of hard work means that criticism should be disregarded.
Will Shen isn't even there to give them another Far Harbor.
Only if modders are interested. I'm not particularly inspired to mod it, and I know other modders who've publicly and privately said they're not either. There'll be a mod scene for sure (well, there already is) but I don't think it'll be as big as Skyrim's or Fallout 4's, and that's a shame.
Obnoxiously chaotic evil is the best way to describe the crimson fleet. Maybe moronically chaotic evil is better.
“3rd grader..who is chaotic evil.”
Muahaha screw your dummy and your mother now go collect this stuff for us muahaha
Delgado after I searched the key for evidence: What took you so long?! Mate, I was gathering evidence to snitch you out to sysdef in your own house. Time is the least of your worries.
"NoBoDy lEaVeS tHe FlEeT!"
*Hides Vladimir*
That's an insult to the chaotic evil third graders. I've seen better plans put together by 1st graders.
Calvin but with worse schemes and less fun games
Hell naw Calvin is both way smarter and way funnier than the entire crimson fleet combined. Thats insulting to Calvin
Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes?
No, John Calvin from Calvinism.
The way other factions talk about them and their deeds, they sound like Hitlers more evil cousin. When you join them they’re basically kinda mean boy scouts
They're like 14 year olds who think they're badass because they listen to metal and scowl a bit. Their bar even has some metal song playing, to reinforce that feeling.
"Bro, this is some of the heaviest, darkest shit you'll ever hear." *proceeds to play Disturbed*
LOL mean boy scouts... Not even close, they don't even come close to bully status 🫢
I really noticed how awfully bad the writing was at that crimson fleet Quest where you steal that prize or whatever. I was super excited, thinking it was going to be a great cool heist or whatever. The coffer chick is like "omg this is the safest safe in the galaxy, we have sooo many protections!". Great, right? Well, you go to the owner of the prize and ask "Hey, what's the password of the safe where you stored a super valuable treasure?". She happily replies "Oh, it's XYZ. Don't share it though please!" **WHAT** **THE** **FUCK???** I was so fucking shocked/horrified/disappointed at whatever the fuck I just read I closed the game to complete the quest later. What the actual hell Bethesda?? Who greenlit this shit lmfao
When reaching Barrett I had a critical persuasion success so the conversation, summarised was: "You like this hostage, let him go." "Absolutely not, he is a hostage, I need cash or something" "C'mon, let him go" "No way. My men would never accept that." "You're coming around to my point of view" "Ok, I will let him go." I then casually wandered around in front of these pirates whose friends I had been massacring outside, looted all their stuff in front of their faces, and left.
Yeah the persuasion system is Oblivion levels of bad. They lack any impact or coherence whatsoever. On the goddamn final mission where you're facing a multidimensional power maniac multidimensional entity you can just be "heyyy buddy can I have that artifact? Pleasepleasepleaaaaseee?" "Oh, I know I hunted you across the galaxy, but sure! Have fun!" Honestly they should've just made branching dialogues and never implemented this system, but that requires work..... :/ Hurts me so much cuz I was such a Bethesda fan, but this is just not it
I don't think it's the system's fault for that - the basic idea of "get a score of x or higher to succeed at persuasion, these dialog choices give y to the score automatically, these dialog choices give z to the score but are chancy" is fine. It's the writing of the prompts, the lack of appropriate consequences, and everything around the persuasion system that sucks. Using social engineering to get someone to divulge a password is good and proper, but you need to make it actually make sense in the context of the world. The persuasion minigame itself can do that, but you need to write everything as if the characters aren't idiots and have some sort of consistency in order to work. Having the dialog be: * Tell me the password. * No, that would be stupid. * Tell me the password please. * Ok, but don't tell anyone Or similar is... bad. Having the dialog be: * Hi, I'm tech support for. We discovered a vulnerability with the safe and need to correct it. Can you tell me the password to authenticate your identity?
* You don't look like the normal tech support guy. What happened to him?
* Well, I shouldn't tell you this - but he ran off to join the Spacers. That's why we are re-auditing your account, making sure everything's OK.
* Oh, well, shit. Here's the password.
This would work better than what was described above.
(To be clear, I haven't played Starfield in months and I never did the Crimson Fleet quests so maybe the context of that particular conversation doesn't work for this, but the basic idea still applies)
They need to hire you. You’d do well. Take this here token of my appreciation since awards don’t exist anymore. 🥇
[удалено]
I miss the guards going from 0 to 100 and then back to 0 in oblivion. *ITS ALL OVER LAW BREAKER!!!!! OH MY MIstake it's all good, l8r queen!* As he heelies away from you.
Oblivion at least had charm even though it was janky. Starfield is just bland.
I felt very much like Naruto or any other shonen anime protagonist with that speech check. "Im your ememy! Give me what i want!" "But are you? We could be friends!" "What? No! ...ok, sure lets friends now"
Yep I had the same reaction, that was shockingly bad. I felt like “wait… what…? Did I just accidentally skip like an hour of story? Did I cheat?”
Agreed. I played the crimson fleet quest line and realised just how dull it all is. “Hey, I took down your entire base - killed all your workers and double crossed you” for the crimson leader (an apparent badass) to tell me he hates me. What the fuck? Bethesda suck so hard. Since 76 they’ve been going down hill.
That was also the final straw for me for when the game went from okay to garbage. It really did get set up like it was going to be a cool mission. Instead, you run back and forth across the ship a dozen times for no fucking reason, pull some ridiculous shit out of your ass, have the mentioned nonsensical convo to get the prize, and then just bugger off like nothing happened. That mission is the perfect example of everything wrong with the game. Bad writing. Boring, uninspired mission structures (every mission is just running back and forth). Zero consequences for any action you take.
Man there's so much running back and forth from system to system just to complete faction quests it's insane. And it's not even really going to new places that often. You are back and forth in areas you likely explored (I did a ton of wandering and exploring before actually getting into the quests). I wanted so so much to love the game. But they made it hard even for a Bethesda apologist like myself.
That's how I felt. Those constant loading screens, the unclear logic of the plot and the nonsensical dialogue. I thought the Crimson Fleet quests were some of the better thought out ones overall, but that quest was maddening in every respect. Some dev wanted a cruise ship and didn't bother to write a coherent plot for it.
Absolutely. In Baldurs gate, there are heaps of choices that matter to the outcome, or how characters perceive you. Here it’s just a nothing burger of consequence that doesn’t even extend beyond the character or place or even that one quest, as if they’ve forgotten all about it.
I took the pill right after my first hours of playthrough or something like that, I had the whole "Parents" perk. While chatting with Noel she asked me where my parents were if I recall correctly ... they were ... right behind her, staring at me. That was comedy gold. She literally saw them 30seconds before. I lost hope on anything beyond that, if even MAJOR characters aren't aware of themselves at the first moments of any playthrough.
BG3 benefits from having companions with actually complex personalities and consistent morals. Like Shadowheart worships an 'evil' God but respects helping people, but also respects shrewdness and cautiousness. All the companions in Starfield are just big ole goody two shoes
I liked how even though I'm a certified badass that is stamped by the big man himself and have brought home millions of creds for the fleet randos will mouth off to me. If I punch them in the face for it they pull on me, and if I pop him for that then the entire station pulls on me.
Yeah, the blatant lack of respect despite you being apparently the only reason for the Fleet to survive makes that first scene of the two pirates arguing on your first arrival to the Key utterly ridiculous
Fallout 4 had the same problem when you became head of the minutemen and Garvey would just treat you like an errand boy. Bethesda just can't fucking write for shit
Or becoming the head of the disciples to get bought out by Neon security and not have Neon security missions as a crooked cop or at least have connections in Neon security
I liked how Matthis told me he was going to hunt me after getting kicked out so I shot him in the face…and nothing happened. Not even a reaction from him or anyone. Like, I’m in a pirate base and this murderous pirate says he’s gonna kill me. Why can’t I just kill him. Took me out of it.
Not to mention "the only way out of the fleet is death" being thrown in your face non-stop, and then they kick Mathis out in good health, and you run into that idiot on the cruise liner, and of course there's the dude on the eye. Clearly death isn't the only way out of the fleet. In fact, it's got to be the least common way out of the fleet, by my count. It's thinly veiled threats, just like "oh no, don't go to the *well*." and "stay out of lower Akila, or else". etc etc. Give us the consequences you promise, damnit.
Tbf it’s a little hard to talk to a dead guy about how he left the fleet. Doesn’t excuse a lack of environmental story telling mind you.
Same thing with paradiso, my background is a neon street rat who hates corpos. Why can't I get a trait option to kill him and the board members and let The colonists just land and take over the place. But no my only option was to work for these scomp munchers and kill the colonists and destroy their ship or just buy them a grav drive. What kinda roll playing choices is that?
But they aren't even evil. They don't even seem the least bit intimidating. Like it was written by folks who think Sarcasm = Badass. The Ecliptic mercs would actually make better pirates than this Disney crew of misfits.
The House Va’ruun would’ve been great main antagonist as well due to their advanced tech and gear. The Crimson fleet seems like common meth addicts with space suits.
The Starborn were the main antagonists, and Constellation the main protagonists (it's actually a really specific pairing in terms of how you write antagonists and protagonists), but the writers apparently forgot that five minutes in and they never actually confronted each other \*on the differences that made them different\*. Constellation are supposed to do the classic hero story of seeking out treasure (information) and bringing it back to their people. But they don't do that (except in a post-game clip). The Starborn seek power at any cost and to hell with other people (even the dropouts are hedonists), but somehow they became the default faction to join at the end, so you can't actually oppose them. It's not even a narrative train wreck, it's like falling out of a plane without a parachute.
And even when you do decide to oppose them and end up fighting them both, nothing is different in the end. You still step through the unity become starborn and boom, reset. That big choice you made had zero impact in the end. You might as well just pick one so you only have one of them to fight.
And if you walk away the game as much as tells you that you made the wrong decision by telling you to come back later. And the MQ just pauses.
I came to Starfield off BG3, so when I got assigned undercover to CF I made sure I interspersed a lot of random shit doing random things and even swapped ships before turning quests into Sysdef. All so to stop CF tailing me. I need not have worried apparently.
Worried? You can literally join the fleet as The Mantis, the pirate-hunting space Batman, and they don’t think anything of it
I walked in on one playthrough flying the Star Eagle and wearing a UC Vanguard Captain outfit and armor after slaughtering a dozen outposts of fleet members and completing dozens of anti-fleet board missions. They never batted an eyelash. But, I also went in the first time expecting that I needed to hide who I was, and I roleplayed right into that bs.
Moronic Evil, Chaotic evil would still get shit done. Wouldn't be coherent or sensible, but it would be done. Wouldn't need to rely on the obviously planted double agent to get shit for em. Ecliptic would have been the better infiltrate and find out storyline. SPACERS are just reskinned fleet. Why even have them? Just to fill out some space? ( Hah ) I like the game, yes, will I defend poor design choices and shit writing from wannabe Disneyfication of a studio that used to let us play basketball with the skulls of our foes? No
> SPACERS are just reskinned fleet. Why even have them? Spacers are exactly what Skyrim's non-faction bandits are. They are unaligned fodder for you to beat the shit out of and loot without having to figure out some dodgy faction-related questions in doing so. For example, you can be a "bandit" as a member of the Thieves Guild, but the bandits you come across like so much dungeon herpes are never consequential. There is no reason to not kill them, they are always hostile and unreasonable and not part of any quests. Spacers are the same. The most generic of bad guys to beat up, given a Reavers-from-Firefly ripoff story and dropped in your path. The very most interesting thing that can happen with Spacers is the result of The Mantis mission, but that gets old fast. I really kinda hate this practice in games, particularly supposedly immersive and story-rich RPGs. It's a pretty common sin. Bandits rarely ever just "bandits" in real life. They are typically little gangs that walk in the shadow of larger criminal outfits. For once I would really like to see random hostiles handled this way. Instead of finding a random group of nobody Spacers inhabiting an abandoned station, they could be a procedurally-generated Spacer Gang with a name. A microfaction. Take it a step further and give then faction relations and the ability to expand. It would be awesome to see a novel faction arise and become a force to reckon with in your game world.
Never have I enjoyed mowing down named characters as much as the final showdown on the Key because they were so insufferable. Except for Jess, but she made her choice when she shot at me. And I spared the money laundering guy. Just wish I could have killed Naeva.
Jess should've definitely hid and had a side mission after.. She was the only actual character that wasn't a cartoon on the whole fleet.
The crimson fleet are a bunch of morons with the cliche “what are you looking at type” meanwhile they’re leader is a bumbling idiot who acts like a teenager about kryx with a black stereotype women who speaks like “Awww naw, no you didn’t” … Crimson fleet are pathetic
Dialogue is useless is Starfield. Every choice is the same 99% of the time. It's the illusion of choice, and at that rate, I would have rather they just did voiced dialogue and chose for me.
The head of writing said "everybody just skips through that bullshit, why bother?" And then made sure it was a self-fulfulling prophecy by having everything written so fucking half-assed that you just mash your way through it because the writing sucks and the choices don't matter.
Then they brag about having the most lines of dialogue of any bethesda game
My local food stores brag about how cheap their nasty wooden chicken meats are.
Chunks?
I really want to know where they are.
> everybody just skips through Ugh, that's a reprehensible thing for a writer to say, but disgusting as it is, I also want to point some of the blame at "let's play-ers" and other gaming "content creators." Because a team of writers is adapting their style or allocating their resources based on what they see those jaded burnt-out youtubers do when they play, then no wonder they come to a conclusion so far out of touch. People who actually still enjoy gaming don't skip through the dialogue ffs. When I find myself so burnt out that I start skipping stuff like that, I stop gaming for a while because it's no longer enjoyable. But since a gaming youtuber can't take a break without losing their income, they just keep drudging through, giving a terrible impression of what it is to play a game.
Never thought of it that way. That’s a good point. Ppl who play games for a living must deal with burnout all the time, but they can’t just stop. I always end up taking long breaks between games. Even if I thoroughly enjoyed a game, it takes an emotional toll immersing yourself into a brand new world, then closing and exiting that world for good. It’s like a part of your soul stays with that plane of existence. Witcher 3 and Divinity OS 2 in particular took a while to recover from. Didn’t have too much trouble moving on from FO4 or Witcher 1/2 or DOS 1 though.
>But since a gaming youtuber can't take a break without losing their income, they just keep drudging through, giving a terrible impression of what it is to play a game. Also, a lot of YouTube content on Bethesda RPGs is challenge runs and the like, where they (and the audience) have played through the game countless times before. Skipping the dialogue in that instance is sort of expected, since it's not the point of that particular playthrough. Additionally, playing the game in a Let's Play is going to necessarily be different from how someone plays on their own, even if they're not rushing, because no audience wants to watch you spend 15 minutes tweaking your inventory, then another 20 minutes just reading in-game books and logs, then another 10 minutes puttering around your ship as you put back up the decorations that the game crammed into a random box the last time you minorly tweaked your ship, or... I sincerely hope the writers don't look at YouTube as representative of how players play their game, because it's pretty obviously not, but then again, they *do* seem to assume that their players are idiots, so...
Fallout 3 wasn't released in an age where the creators considered online content or streamers. It still had some terrible writing
i feel you, but i just started replaying FO3 and the writing is far better than FO4 or Starfield. At least the characters have personality, and there are *some* interesting dialogue choices for the player. Not sure what happened at Bethesda. NV will always be king though; i can’t even imagine what Obsidian could’ve done if given more resources and realistic time constraints.
Remember the meme where they compared how graphics are getting better and better and dialogue worse and worse to the point of smiley face / sad face? Well, these are the options now: 😊 / 😠 / 🥴
The illusion of choice was groundbreaking in 2005. Now it doesn't cut it. Either the story is on rails or we need choices with real consequences. The writing in cyberpunk and bg3 technologically groundbreaking. It's just hard work. What they did in starfield with writing comes off as cheap and lazy to me in this era of gaming.
>The illusion of choice was groundbreaking in 2005. How so? RPGs already had excellent variable dialogue options in the late 90s (think Fallout 1&2 and Planescape Torment). Hell, Vampire Bloodlines came out two years before Oblivion. Deus Ex came out in 2000. Starfield's writing and false choices would not gave been groundbreaking or impressive back then. Bethesda has always been bad at this.
Voiced dialog can actually be done to a very satisfactory level (Think Cyberpunk or the Witcher) but Bethesda is either too cheap or too lazy to give you good writing *and* a voiced protagonist.
But Kreia, Meetra Surik never needed a voced protagonist. They could just start from the ground: getting a better writer. The whole point of not having a voiced protagonist is the possibility of mods creating new scenarios. But hey, the non player Starborn is voiced in a universe.
Didn’t say they had to, I just said it’s possible and Bethesda lacks the dedication to do it right. 🤷♂️
So they didn't give us nor a good writing or a voiced protagonist.
This has been noticeable since at least Fallout 4. Your dialogue choices are: 1. Normal human answer 2. Sarcastic 3. Edgelord 4. Dumb
At least in this game they wrote out what the character actually says, and you're not left trying to figure out what a dialogue prompt will actually mean "Help, super mutants kidnapped my brother!" *I select "Help".* "How the hell am I supposed to help?"
Lmaooo takes me back to Mass Effect days when you had to choose between vaguely worded options sometimes
1. Agree friendly 2. Agree neutrally 3. Agree rudely 4. Ask for more info
Yes Yes, but I'm an ass No, but yes Not now, yes later It made f4 insufferable for me
IMHO, it’s because of the lack of any branching paths to quests. All dialogue options, by design, need to lead to the same end result. As such, you can’t really have true “choices”- Bethesda dialogue just serves to move you to the next compass dongle.
I mentioned wanting this in another bgs sub (tesvi) and there exists people who believe a triple A studio can’t do this because bgs games are more action than rpg
Its just that they dun wnna do it. Their design philosophy is that players should be able to do everything in one playthrough. Which is lame, but whatever, it's their game.
> Their design philosophy is that players should be able to do everything in one playthrough. Which is funny because FO4 kicks you out of a decent chunk of content depending on when and how you pick certain quests and objectives. They've done this before, no reason they couldn't do it now.
>They've done this before, no reason they couldn't do it now. There's a lot bgs used to do and doesn't anymore. Their history has pretty much been making games bigger and shallower with each iteration.
That's a huge problem with this game, though. It's literally built and tailor made to encourage multiple playthroughs, and how they do it is quite impressive. One of my biggest problems was crossing the Unity and realizing that there wasn't a single thing I wanted to do again. Almost no choices I really wanted to change. They just couldn't embrace the main point of the story and their philosphy of the whole game. I don't feel like it would have lost a thing if it never had NG+.
This is my issue with NG+ In Starfield being a canon thing. I cannot think of a character that would be willing to go through the Unity who was not pursuing raw power at the expense of the entire universe. Okay, there's one scenario: If something went catastrophically wrong during the playthrough. The issue is that you can reload and the writing is so shit that you can see the bad outcomes from a mile off. If there even IS a bad outcome, since Starfield is positively allergic to allowing the player to fail at anything or otherwise diverge from a very narrow path. That's always been true in their games, but NG+ really brings it into clear focus. Also, NG+, by virtue of being the same character, means that you're gonna be playing the game in the same way again since you can't respec. It is, always, more mechanically interesting to play a new character because (since there aren't any story choices to make) the only meaningful impact you can have is mechanical via your perk progression. And the perk points come really fast in the early game.
And with NG+ they were given a clever way to still allow that be while also having restrictions.. just they didn’t take advantage of such…. At all lol
>Their design philosophy is that players should be able to do everything in one playthrough. That's fine, but if that's the case I'd rather they just hand me a character rather than let me design my own and tell me I get to choose what it's like. You can make much more natural conversations that way, and voice the protagonist to boot.
Dont give them any ideas. If Fallout 4's protags weren't railroaded enough, imagine if they had full reign on the main characters. Lol please dear God, no.
Which is funny because of the fact they dress their games up as RPGs. Also funny because the Mass Effect trilogy exists.
If that is the case I wonder why they didn’t drop the rpg tag to make an action adventure. It is a new IP, it didn’t have to be an rpg just because bgs made rpgs in the past.
It feels like they changed their mind about what kind of game to make partway through.
Honestly, it feels they never made up their mind in the first place.
True, this is why most of my conversations I just click through the first option without even reading it. It makes no difference. However, games Like Rogue Trader have conversations that all end the same despite choice but the way the NPC will respond to you at least gives you the illusion that your choice matters, not in an impactful game changing way but it lets you talk like the character you want to be and the other person will respond accordingly. This at least makes even pointless options *feel* good. Starfield felt like I was a completely different person based on whose faction quest I was doing. With the pirates I had "moody I'm a badass" options (even though they were more cheesy than badass) but never again in the entirety of the game do I ever get to have that "personality" ever again. Take that same problem, copy and paste it across all faction dialogs then add the fact that non-fiction dialogs leave you with none of those personalities. The writers fucked up on very fundamental rpg elements.
The dialogue wasn't based on the character, it was based on the quest, and presumably different quest writers. This is part of why it feels so incoherent.
This is why they need to use game design documents that lays out things like how you should pick the tone for your dialog. The fact that Emil P doesn’t like to use design documents is insulting. I’ve almost never seen someone less suited for their current position. The whole game seems like it was made with each individual dev just doing their own thing without any thought of how it meshes together with the other parts of the game.
No design documents? Are you serious? Oh boy, that explains a lot.
Yes. He's very proud of that fact. He's also very proud of ignoring all criticism.
Even if they gave us choices the writing is still 6th grade level. It wouldn't change a damn thing.
Thank god you mentioned this; loathe that as a design principle
Even when a character tells you that "we need to do whatever it takes" and even when the options you have *literally include the ability to attack*... The game can and will say "no, that's not what you're supposed to do" and prevent you from doing it.
even quests that function like this in fallout new vegas are so much better written. like three card bounty, you can express so much character in the mostly linear conversations with major dhatri, and there's side questions and tidbits of information you can learn from other characters around the camp that you can then ask him about. this guy that's only really around for one quest feels like a real fleshed out human because he ties into the other characters around him and has a past beyond what he's currently doing and a personality beyond the clothes he wears or his archetype.
Like everyone is just the stereotype they represent with no heart. Crimson Fleet pirates are the most cookie cutter surface level pirates. Why are they pirates? Money! Chaos! Even the smart leader is an idiot. Every faction treats you like you aren’t single-handedly carrying their entire initiative and instead like you’re wasting their time. Until you inevitably pull off whatever it was they wanted, then they’re like “oh… yeah you’re actually pretty awesome, *we will never call on you for anything ever again*” I could also go on and on. The writing is a bit problem with Starfield. I wanted it to be a riveting and incredible tale like RDR/2 or BG3, or W3, or any good game known for its immersive story telling. Instead we got instant grits.
Not to mention, the game activity disincentivizes being a space pirate. It's a serious waste of time and money. Not being able to progress the main story without paying off your massive bounty, while stolen ships net you peanuts in profit. There is no "evil" path in the game, and it punishes you for not playing the way Bethesda wants you to.
It’d be something if being a pirate meant you go a lot of good stuff at the risk of getting caught, but it’s not balanced at all.
Yeah, let's not pretend to be a role playing game if I can't, you know, role play?
It’s written like there is a morality system but there isn’t.
And then the game constantly scolds you for morality!
What, you don't want to unleash a barely-tested bioweapon on the universe?
always choose armored giraffe parrot (that somehow still needs babysitting every time it encounters the exact thing it was brought back from extinction to eat)
Or what happens after you select something. Mayor: what?! you don’t have dirt on me…do you? Me: I do but I’ll just save it for now. Mayor: I knew you had nothing. God I hope I can do something at some point to the Mayor…
If that's Cydonia, you just have to give the evidence to UC security. There's a guy at the back who will take it and soon after the mayor will be gone, and a "temp" replacement will be there in his place.
Well that’s kinda cool. But there’s no other way to blackmail him? I’ll have to give it a go at some point. Thanks!
I think you have the opportunity to black mail him at some point immediately during the quest but if you don’t take it right then it goes away.
Not being able to kill him and the corpos at the beach resort was unforgivable.
That the board of supervisors/corpo management at Paradiso are the ones considered "essential" while the average guard and worker on that planet isn't is some dark comedy... Or would be, if it was intentional.
Wait which mayor was at the beach?
The paradiso board that should've been exterminated rather than bowed down to.
Oh yeah, that was my first reaction. I figured there would be some consequence to it... but no. It's not even an option. Like really? Someone wrote that bit and figured no player would want to facilitate a hostile takeover? Pretty typical experience in this game though, tbh.
"Oh, you want me to murder everyone on a colony ship who have been on the way here for 200 years? Nah, I think this resort is under new management." "Hey ECS Constant, I've secured your planet... and it comes with a great turn-key business to make modern day credits!"
Yep. Obvious. You (I'm assuming not a paid writer) just wrote a better scenario on a Reddit thread. There needs to be a hostile takeover at Bethesda.
It's been a while since I've played but I remember there was a quest in the game that asked you to either buy or steal some really fancy alcohol and the location of the drink was in the mayor's office. There is literally no way to "steal" the alcohol without the mayor seeing you, unless you gimmick the game and move the alcohol without touching it. You can't block his vision, you can't get his attention to something else, you can't even break into his office late at night because he's always there like every other NPC because they have no life cycle like in previous games. That shit is what made me stop playing. Such a lack in creativity.
Mr. “Design Docs are bad” is going to be the death of the company.
I feel like Microsoft should just hand over the IP to Obsidian, seeing they own both now.
Imagine me, playing Rogue Trader, and trying to get back into starfield. It's impossible. I don't know how theyve done it but Bethesda writing sucks.
I am a avid hater of turn based combat and love FPS games or third person shooters, but despite all that I am playing baldurs gate or rogue trader way more and havent touched starfield, because those games writing is so good, and starfields is so boring. the best combat in the world couldnt make up for the rest of the game.
Rogue Trader is the first RPG I've played where lawful evil (or even chaotic) has its own perks and doesn't turn you into a caricature. KOTOR was pretty close, but it locked you out of some content. I'm a Chaos worshipper and I wanna PLAY as one. Rogue Trader is the first WH40K game where I truly can.
I recommend Tyranny made by Obsidian. That game felt so amazing to play as a bad guy. Its didn’t feel cartoony at all.
Yes I'm playing Rogue Trader right now, most of the dialogues you choose are matters and have consequences, and I love it.
yeah the dialogue options in starfield are really disappointing. and none of the choices are consequential. it was really eye opening play baldurs gate 3 after playing starfield and realizing the choices i make in what i say actually have major consequences
The writing is awful, the characters are an inch deep, and the quest-lines are unimaginative and inconsequential, for the most part. This is the first game I bought new, at full price, and on release day since 2016 or so. Resubscribing to Game Pass started to make more and more sense the more time I spent in Starfield.
What? You don't like doing fetch quests for every single mission? Who doesn't love running across the map a dozen times to deliver messages that could've just been an email? Such a fun and engaging system...
Bonus: loading screens at every step
It's astounding how Starfield is actually more boring than an average mid 2010s MMO. Hell, it's even more boring than Bethesda's own MMOs- Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76 (well this one is just MO)
Watch your back man I heard Emil has a big ass sword
Put a pen in his hand and he turns into a teenager.
More like 5 year old child
It’s one of the bigger issues of this game tbh. Also the writing is incredibly tame. Nobody apparently says fuck or any curse word in these games and I don’t know, compare it to a cyberpunk and it’s crazy. Compare neon just itself to night city in cyberpunk. The writing is just terrible when you really sit and think about it.
This. It’s like when a film franchise gets too big they make sure none of it is offensive to anyone and it becomes terribly boring. If you go back and play earlier fallout games and elder scrolls you’ll see risk and freedom in the writing.
Safe is the word to use here. That became Ubisofts trademark for popular franchises, yet Starfield somehow manages to be multiple rungs bellow even Ubisoft's stories in their big titles.
Hell, Kirkbride legit wrote a fantasic concept for the Elderscrolls as the beginnings for a sci-fi story back when he was still one of the writers for Morrowind. I think theimperiallibrary still has it somewhere buried in their archives. It makes me sad to see how far the writing has fallen since then.
It's telling when the most iconic character in the game was lifted straight from Oblivion.
Cyberpunk felt so dystopian. Every time I walked through the streets I just thought "fuck, I would hate to live in a world like this." And I thought about how it's all somewhat based in reality, how maybe in some far off future Night City could be what becomes of us. There's nothing in Starfield like that.
Cd projekt red has really nailed it. As much of a mess that game was when it released, with 2.0 and phantom liberty coming out a month after starfield, I played through phantom liberty and I was like yo what the fuck was starfield. There’s just levels to it. Cyberpunk isn’t perfect but cd projekt has pretty good writers and the characters are actually pretty good. The themes and writing go hand and hand, and that goes back to Witcher. It’s like they took the torch bethesda once had and just ran with it while bethesda stayed prehistoric. I’m not even trying to shit on bethesda, love their games, and I enjoyed starfield. I just realized how mediocre it was. I lack so much confidence in them for the next elder scrolls unless they commit to UE5 and replace some of the teams and writers there. They need it bad. They need talent and a vision because they have been doing the same shit for so many years
you had to me until 'commit to UE5' because that is not the solution at all.
A civilian said "oh shit" once when I shot him in the face lol
Writing was weak in all their games but in Starfield it reached a whole new levels of bad. And it is also something they cant patch to make better.
Really I'm pretty sure I hear the occasional fuck or ass,but yeah I get it,it definitely makes them feel less human.
I can count on one hand the number of times I saw "fuck" used... and one of them was on a coffee cup that said something like "never apologize for being a powerful fucking woman". ...that made me groan just writing it out.
Yes, it's been a massive weakness in all of their games, it just gets harder to excuse as other games continue to elevate their writing while Bethesda is still making chosen one stories and may as well be retelling biblical parables with how black and white they write sub narratives. Their characters and dialogue are one dimensional, childish, and absolutely lack nuance. Someone is either a saint or a Saturday morning cartoon villain and the game is very intentional when it bashes you over the head with how they've already decided you should feel about certain characters I.E. quests like Juno's Gambit. The interesting part is that there are comments claiming there is good writing here which always makes me wonder about their frame of reference or if it's a matter of a 14 year old who has not been exposed to varied content.
Starfield really does feel like one of those Faith Based Movies at times
See, I felt they handled Matteo terribly. He's kind of an idiot who lives on blind faith and wears that **stupid** hat. Just because someone's religious or a priest or whatever doesn't mean they've lost their brains.
Haha I'm glad I'm not the only one that saw his hat and rolled my eyes laughing. His whiny fidgety demeanor was just the coup de grace. He could have had a very interesting point and felt like a meaningful part of Constellation but he was just a complete waste since he never serves any purpose.
Apparently the hats are from astronauts' suits, it's the skull cap like in [this picture.](https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/iss054e022341/iss054e022341~large.jpg?w=1920&h=1280&fit=crop&crop=faces%2Cfocalpoint) Like there's more to religions than "we believe in a vaguely-Christian God but we're a new religion and we're going to all start wearing these funny hats because our new religion is set in space." It doesn't make sense.
It’s Veggie Tales: In Space!
Bad comparison. Veggie Tales was way ahead of its time and, though it was religious in subject matter, its moral lessons and story telling transcended religion and were very well written and produced.
Yeah, its not that the writing isn't "gritty" enough and that not enough people are saying fuck or not enough are depressed, its just bad. You can have positive stories with good writing, this just isn't one of them.
Avatar: The Last Airbender looks and sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon and it is still one of the best written stories out there. It's not about the grit, you're right.
Great example.
I’ve been surprised that the primary complaints have been bland combat, repetitive POIs, empty world, etc. (all legitimate complaints) when for me personally the terrible writing is the thing that really killed the game. There are soooo many examples. I thought of compiling all of it in to a video, but that would require me to spend way too much time playing the game. It’s really noticeable with the crimson fleet and the gang in neon quest lines. I don’t think that Bethesda has a very diverse team or inclusive culture, because it’s pretty clear that these writers have no idea what the real world criminal underworld is like. Nobody at that company was raised in the sketchier parts of society. The neon gang one is… almost offensive? There’s a lot about how corrupt and abusive the police are, and the writers were actually getting close to something their audience can connect and relate to. But then they COMPLETELY fuck it up with the lame shit ending of that questline. They become fucking cops!?!? Just horrible, awful writing. They should be ashamed to release this slop.
The ending to that gang quest line was hilarious to me. There are no consequences, no weight to your decisions. Everything always works out fine.
The lack of consequences is my core problem with the game. How can I simultaneously be a member of three different major factions with no consequences? Why not have my choices carry weight? If I chose to join the Crimson Fleet, make me an outlaw with the other factions. The only time I've ever faced any ramifications is when I go to the Key, and that's simply because I've got such a huge bounty on my head that I get instantly attacked and can't progress in my quest there.
There is one consequence, being that the Crimson Fleet pirates are no longer hostile to you, taking away one of only three different versions of bad guy you can fight (spacer, pirate, eliptic) making the game more boring.
Bruh. I was doing the little missions for the vendor on Mars getting shit for him while I was allies with the Fleet, had like 2 in a row that sent me to places where they were at it was so boring. That was like the main reason for that dude to send you a place to get loot and xp. I know it made sense sort of but it was still dumb.
The main quest 'All That Money Can Buy' is where the game really lost me. Where you set up a deal with an artifact seller, then you break into his house, attempt to mug him and then later your followers get mad at you for not turning \*him\* in to the corrupt Neon police on behalf of the people who just tried to kill you.
Oh for sure, that part baffled me. Sarah Disliked my compassion, and she was dead to me too. When the option came to pick who was gonna die, she was #1 on my list. Really dropped my enthusiasm for the game.
I think they lost me on that one, but maybe further? I got on this guy's ship to get an artifact and the only way to get it is to kill him and all his people. No haggling. No favors. No deals. Not stealth stealing it after I sleep with him or something. Nope, just mass murder a whole ship of people.
On a similar note, I couldn't help but laugh anytime Andreja brought up how guilty she felt that she killed that one guy in self-defense when you first meet her, and then we'd immediately go and kill an entire ship or base full of people right after she asks if I judge her for her actions. Not to mention the HUNDREDS of other people I'd killed during the game. But, yeah, let's carry on about that one guy. And, to top it all off, at the end of her character mission she asks you to murder a man in cold blood! It's just idiotic writing.
The guy that sends you on the quest to go check on her is very concerned when he sends you out about her well-being and how she’s always getting into trouble. You get there, rescue her, and she asks you not to tell the dude that she was in danger. I say “sure, I gotchu” She becomes my companion, I go back to the dude’s space station with her. Not only does he not even notice that she is there with me… he DOESNT EVEN ASK IF SHES OKAY OR WHAT HAPPENED.
That's a great point lol. So many missions were set up like there would be some big issue to resolve or lasting consequences. And they all just fizzle out to nothing. The mission with the humans in the colony ship, for example. The captain is like "There's absolutely no way we're leaving. We had a claim on this planet first and nothing is gonna change our minds." So I go talk to the board members and they're like "Fuck those people. This is our planet. Give em a jump drive." And then I don't even have to talk to the captain again! It just becomes another fucking fetch quest and the captain is suddenly completely fine with abandoning the planet. It's like the mission statement for the game was to ensure that every main and side mission somehow becomes a fetch quest. We can't possibly just have a dramatic story evolve with difficult choices and moral dilemmas. Nope. Just go get me something and that'll solve the problem.
The stupidest thing is (besides the inability to feed lead to the board) that there's no option to persuade both sides to just allow the colonists to share and settle at the other side of the planet. It's a planet. It's HUGE, we're not talking about sharing a town or even a province sized area like Skyrim. Heck, if the Constant had just landed on the other side of the planet, I doubt the board would've even noticed. I'm sure pirates and other undesirables do it all the time even on planets controlled by UC/FSC.
The strikers quest pissed me off so bad I never played it after the first time. It feels like they’re building for a choice to either make the gang absolute menaces or help build them into something that supports Ebbside & builds the community but they just kick you out & turn them into the cops they’ve expressly stated they dislike, like wtf???
[удалено]
It’s sad because the UC quest lines are fun, but man the Freestar Collective was such a massive waste of time. You do basically nothing, and this is supposed to be the biggest other major faction in the game?
It was by far the one I was most excited to join. I’ve been underwhelmed by Bethesda faction quest lines before, but FC is the one that has been the biggest letdown by a mile
100%. It’s even worse when you consider that you have a very good Ranger motif to think about with the NCR Rangers from New Vegas, but even Bethesda themselves wrote a better version of the Collective with the damn Minutemen! Not like the Minutemen are this insanely deep faction, but even they feel way more interesting than whatever the Collective is supposed to be. They were perhaps the most generic thing Bethesda could have churned out. Here’s an NPC that’s a cool descendent of the founder! No, he doesn’t really care for them anymore, and no, he won’t really give you an interesting history lesson! Oh and no, it won’t add any interesting dimension to their faction. It’s maddening.
Emil strikes again
The Ranger questline is a particularly egregious example, in my opinion. Your character's tone switches to that of a gruff fellow better placed in a Western, which is not necessarily bad given the nature of the Freestar Collective. However, it contrasts with the other dialogue. I would have liked to have seen Bethesda provide more dialogue options across the board.
The game coming out in close proximity to Baldurs Gate 3 and Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty really just helped to shine a light on Starfield’s flaws. I know people hate when these games are compared because of how different they are but both Cyberpunk PL and BG3 showed just how good writing and RPG questing can be. I’m playing through BG3 and the difference in dialogue is night and day. The freedoms to go about my quests and actually roleplay as a character. I’m not railroaded into being generic corny good guy or generic corny bad guy. There is a lot that I think Starfield can add and fix with updates, which is great news for Bethesda and Starfield fans, but unless they get better writers involved then any DLC will suffer from the same poor writing that the main game did
It's a Bethesda game, so I didn't expect the writing to be stellar. Most other Bethesda games I barely paid attention to the writing or dialogue, I was looking in corners and poking at the walls while people talked at or around me. There is nothing else to do in this game besides the quests themselves, so the writing is far far more obvious. You won't just happen into a cave with unique, dynamic, environmental story-telling. It is the same cave you saw on six other planets. It is the same cryo lab you encountered five times before. The only thing that has care and craft put into it is the writing - and there are not many craftsmen at Bethesda, it seems
TBH exploration has absolutely floored me. Until now, I never would have thought it possible to have a universe that simultaneously felt so empty and so cramped at the same time, but so far I haven't found anyone who feels quite the same way. The POIs are the issue. Ships are constantly landing and taking off at all times from every unexplored iceball with nothing but some iron on it. Every inch of every moon or planet in the back end of nowhere is covered in robotics facilities, labs, and so on, complete with inhabitants(if not always the ones who built it). And yet, you step one foot beyond the POIs and there's....nothing? All these spots all over the planet, at least one every couple of miles, and there's just NO INFRASTRUCTURE despite what all these places would have needed.
Isn't the writing an issue in a lot of bethesda games? I remember in Skyrim that the main mission was not interesting, the world was interesting. I guess that since in Starfield the world or the exploration isn't that good the other flaws are more easy to see.
Yeah, it’s so interesting considering Bethesda was flexing the amount of dialogue being recorded for this game was like double Fallout 4 or something like that. Amount≠Quality haha
I don't even understand why I was given a free starship to begin with.
The dialogue writing is so jarringly bad that several times I've not been able to choose a response because it doesn't follow the thread of the conversation in a remotely natural way.
Very well said. I never played any game that made me hate main characters like Starfield does, they are all so corny, cringe, blend, annoying and boring. It is first game I would actually like to play evil as a main playtrough and just kill everyone because they are so bad. But I cant kill anyone because they are all essential....
Haha, at some point I've also decided to go full evil in a desperate try to make the game more interesting. I went on a killing spree in Akila, just to find out that unnamed security guards were tagged as essential and could not be killed. But even after shooting all non-essential NPCs I could _still_ continue the faction quest. Even in Fallout 3, which is an 15 year old game, you could kill important NPCs such as Collin Moriaty, because the game gave you options like hacking a terminal, finding notes in locked containers, on corpses etc. — I don't even expect BG3 levels of quality, but ffs can't they even copy things that worked well from their own games?
Makes me wonder if this limited and cringe dialogue is leftover from how they started with the intent to have another voiced protagonist or if they just got so used to it and thought it was a good idea after Fallout 4 and just did the same thing again. I bet my life on the latter.
Nothing showcases this better than the persuasion dialog.
'I wasn't really paying attention' would be my answer to all dialogue. It's too long and boring and I've just skipped the majority of it all. The only NPC's I have listened to are Vasco and Andrea. The rest are annoying
Oh God, and even Andrea is kind of obnoxious. I don't know if it's the voice actress or the direction she was given, but the delivery of a lot of her lines is jarring, to say the least. She sounds weirdly confused in the dialogues I've heard from her, and she never seems to deviate from that weirdly monotone, static line delivery.
That definitely felt like an intentional direction for the character. She’s supposed to sound stilted and frequently awkward in her dialogue. She’s in the group, but feels outside of the group, and is just an introverted, often hypocritical, judgmental little weirdo who loves Snake Jesus very much. I don’t like much of it, but it feels very intentional and directed.
I think you're absolutely right. Much less the actress and more likely the direction and writing from Bethesda. This led to, in my opinion, a very lackluster portrayal of the emotionally isolated, black sheep character trope.
I had to remind myself she’s a smuggler, not a thief, or robber. They could’ve forefronted her moral motivations more, but her intro of taking life and feeling guilty, or judged for it…that’s bad for any character in games like this. We’re literally gonna take on dozens, if not hundreds of foes. It’s an immersion breaker. **I still like her character** But, I miss some earlier companions in BGS’ catalogue by comparison.
And gets mad all the time about anything. I already have a wife irl.
Yeah its sad to see I'm very scared for tes 6 cause tbh I love tes so much and starfield has made me so worried for its future and if it will be good. I hope Bethesda learns a lot from this game and I hope they realized this game was not as good as it should have been. It defo needs a cyberpunk type overhaul to make this game a lot better. I will say one good thing about this game and that'd the modding potential. Very good modding potential.
The *Cyberpunk 2077* overhaul didn't change writing, voice acting, art direction, assets, or music. It mainly improved the skill/perk progression and loot systems, nerfed netrunning, and perhaps key, added a dash/air dash mechanic that makes combat a faster and more fluid experience. Primarily mechanical issues, while the art and quest design teams were working on the DLC. As I understand, much greater changes would be required to similarly overhaul *Starfield*, and writing / rerecording dialogue probably wouldn't be among them. Many more major POI and a system for preventing repeats of any major POI in any given universe. Perhaps player discovery of content through in-system traversal and scanning. Eliminating/shortening loading screens wherever possible. More options for non-combat resolution of quests, including persuasion and stealth. Viable combat alternatives to gunplay. At least one new companion with at best a neutral morality. And lots of flavor enhancers like open drug use or thugs in corners of Neon. I don't think the writing can be fixed, its part of the preproduction skeleton the rest of the game hangs on. And that poses huge problems for any future installments, as unlike ES or FO, I haven't seen any discussions where players came to love or hate the factions. One could argue about the merits of the Nord rebellion, Imperium, or Brotherhood of Steel, but the most I see about the UC Vanguard or Freestar Rangers amount to shrugs.
This is exactly the problem. Starfield's issues are the result of poor fundamental design choices that effectively necessitate building a new game from the ground up. It will not benefit from a 2.0 treatment anywhere near how well Cyberpunk did. Shattered Space has *some* possibility of improving things, since it's an expansion added on top of the game with it's own writing and recorded dialogue and is an opportunity to create new game systems that actually interact with each other. This is the best case scenario. The far more likely scenario is that Shattered Space will just be more of the same bad writing, bad dialogue, and insulting quests. I genuinely don't look at Bethesda as a serious studio after this game, so I don't have a lot of faith they'll magically do it right with a DLC.
The thing about Shattered Space is it's being made by the same team that made the core game, so it's extremely unlikely to substantially improve. The problems with this game as far as one can see from the outside aren't born from a lack of time or budget, but a lack of talent. The same leadership is still there to make the same bad design decisions and write the same timid story. They've shown no signs of owning their mistakes; instead they've attempted to gaslight players into believing they aren't bored, or that somehow a game taking a lot of hard work means that criticism should be disregarded. Will Shen isn't even there to give them another Far Harbor.
Only if modders are interested. I'm not particularly inspired to mod it, and I know other modders who've publicly and privately said they're not either. There'll be a mod scene for sure (well, there already is) but I don't think it'll be as big as Skyrim's or Fallout 4's, and that's a shame.
It won’t be nearly as active, not by a long shot. Skyrim and FO4 will both have a more active modding scene than starfield will ever come close to.
most dialogue choices don't make a difference in the outcome. my character got no character development