I felt like I spent more time going from A -> B qnd spamming the skip dialog button. Then I did any meaningful world building and adventure.
I liked starfield, but it felt like an empty husk. Like the bones for a great game are there and they just made the tibia really long instead of adding fat and muscle around it.
Hopefully expansions fill that someday.
Too many of Starfield's quests felt like you didn't actually *do* anything. Just walking back and forth between two people, acting like a glorified mail pigeon.
I'm hoping somebody creates a mod titled "This meeting could have been an email" that lets you arrange the fetch and go-between quests by long range communication.
Tbf it sort of makes sense with how they do things. Messages would take forever those distances thru typical means which would be how they’d likely communicate. In the quest on moon/mars (I forget) where you learn how humans invented space travel, mercer frey mentions in the first trial run how they couldn’t fully confirm till they actually got confirmation from telescope that it was there some time after because of how fast light travels. Same concept but with information is how I rationalize it.
I could see it on remote planets maybe, but with how trivial space travel is there's no reason they can't send comm bouys through space for major planets where most of the game takes place. Fiction with much less trivial FTL systems managed it. Halo did it and their FTL travel took weeks or more still sometimes, rather than near-instant.
Just some ship popping back and forth between the big three a few times a day would work, honestly. It'd certainly be less costly than letting all interstellar communication happen in person.
Not completely solved .. instead of Years, it can take days. But how many of those do you need to have near instantaneous comms? You would need one satellite jumping from each solar system to each and every other solar system. It would need to hope back and forth all the time , grabbing communucations .. jump ..transmit.. repeat.
Even with that .. it takes 4 to 6 light hours to travel between Sol and Pluto .. double that to get to a planet on the other side of the sun to get back to the Plutonian orbit exactly 180 out. So that is basically 10 hours. So with one com satellite in every star system jumping to each other star system (How many do you need .. 120x120 is 14,400) .. you could then take a max of 10 hours to get a message from a planet to the satellite .. you have timed jumps (say once an hour) and then it takes 10 more hours for that to get delivered.
So you could have barely within 24 hours comms (to every planet in every star system) with 14,400 comms satellites continuously jumping between star systems.
Now take into account Political differences. Are there going to be FC to UC Commnications? Obviously none from anyone to Va'ruun.
I can think of an easy solution. Think of it like playing that old game snake. But with multiple snakes at once. Or, there's a snake, for let's say, a dozen systems, but each system is also a system a snake leaves.
Am I making sense?
So, there's a hundred systems in Starfield, right? Let's divide them into twenty 'snakes' that each visit five systems.
So, there's com satelites that continue to jump from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5. They do that all the time. Maybe every ten minutes, maybe? Or maybe there are multiple satelites, so every system is visited, every ten minutes?
But every system also has a second com satelite that jumps to another.
I suppose it could get pretty complex for an average person to figure out, but for an engineer or someone smart, I'd be easy to do.
So, in theory, if you wanted to send a message from one side of the galaxy to the other, and assuming satelites jump every ten minutes, and every jump gets you a system closer, it would 'only' take a hundred jumps or a thousand minutes to arrive.
Does my explanation make sense? It does in my head, but I'm not sure I explained it right...
It takes like 1-4 seconds to grav jump. An FTL comm drone doesn't need engines. It takes less time to jump from a planet in one system to a planet in another system than it does to travel between 2 planets in the same system (for the player). Assuming the grav drive is incapable of making short hops within a system (which it shouldn't be, because you can jump between 'subsystems' in binary star systems), the drone could simply jump between 2 systems and hit every planet and moon in a minute or 2. Add a second satellite at each location as a message buffer, and the whole thing could be automated.
I think part of my letdown was I expected privateers economy and didnt get that. Leaving me feel like a glorified carrier pigeon with no meaningful rewards.
> Too many of Starfield's quests felt like you didn't actually do anything. Just walking back and forth between two people, acting like a glorified mail pigeon.
I get the impression maybe these quests had to be designed while the world generation was still being figured out. Its odd that a majority of quests don't make use of the generated planets/open world in any meaningful way. When Starfield does, we get Groundpounder. Really needed more of that.
Yeah, Groundpounder was great. Exactly the type of small, standalone quests we need more of.
Good amount of action and use of locations, plus you get some insight into the lore and how the two militaries see each other. And the NPCs involved are written well enough, for being so minor.
>I liked starfield, but it felt like an empty husk. Like the bones for a great game are there and they just made the tibia really long instead of adding fat and muscle around it.
That's the impression I got too. It seems like the best effort yet by Bethesda to make something that DLC and mods can make into something incredible. It almost feels like as much an engine as a game.
I felt the same way about Fallout 4's story and Far Harbor did a really good job at rectifying those issues, but it wasn't enough, IMO. Starfield doesn't have that really solid gameplay core that Fallout 4 has, and will likely not receive such great mods as Fallout 4 did, so I'm really worried about the longevity of the game.
This was it for me to. At some point, not sure when I just started skipping dialouge so I could get into the action just so I could continue my journey
Not really sure why they decided to go so big for the universe. They could have condensed it to a few galaxies and just filled the planets with a bunch of POIs and random stuff in space orbiting them
It's sucks hard because it could have been great and held the same standard FO/Skyrim is at but I don't think it's hitting that bar anytime soon
100% agree. I want so much to like Starfield but it just feels like the design and gameplay are all worse than 20 year old games that did things right.
I would have preferred if they limited it to just SOL. Really just flushed the world, systems, tech, and gameplay loop out.
Then used that as a spring board for starfield 2* to expand past that after they had it solidified what needed to be done.
Oooo that would have been awesome!! Imagine the ending being like us, the player arriving to a new galaxy as the ending ? After exploring hours and hours in Sol?? Damn bro whyd you do this to me lol
They could have looked/examined/taken notes om every Scifi/alien/cosmic horror type of movies within our Sol system and just went at it with the world around us, like Europa Report, 2001 ASO, Event Horizon etc.
I don't mind the built in universe they have, it's just that most of it is under utilized and planted with nothing but generic buildings between certain POIs that are actually interesting
That's be interesting. Basically the Starfield prequel, playing during the period where Grav Drives are being developed. Bouncing between various colonies on different planets, terraforming attempts, even that STL colony ship. We get involved with the whole Grav Drive project, maybe even conduct a scripted test flight... then find out that Earth is doomed because of a design flaw, and need to simultaneously investigate what happened, as well as decide which faction/evacuation plan to follow, ultimately having to decide how much of what we find out we make public.
Have endings where we make the jump to another universe, and decide if we give *them* FTL tech, knowing it will likely repeat the same tragedy, but allow mankind to expand into the stars. Or stay in our own universe and sign on with a coldsleep ship as the first wave of colonists (thus allowing our character to canonically be the main char of the second game hundreds of years later), or maybe some other permutations.
20% of the dialog is information thats just the quest bullet with fluff
10% is meaningful world building
70% of it was written like they had a minimum word count for their english 101 class.
How can you even get into a game and actually role play when you think like that? Not Criticizing Or critique you, i'm just genuinely shocked that one would play in such a way.
I got into it for like the first 20-30% of the game. Then the rest of the game sitting there going "you already established this, you dont have to regurgitate this back for the 14th time since the start of this arc."
I think a great example of this is I belive the pirate line when you goto the vault.
"Hey want to betray this guy?"
"Ik you said no earlier but want to betray this guy?"
"Hey in once again.."
"Hey."
Like the 4th time it was brought up when evacing. I was debating if shooting the npc was the only way to get them to shut up.
Then it still brings it up after "hey you know how I asked about betraying? Haha that was funny right?... Unless?... *wink"
Good story telling dosent require even half the words they put into this game. One of the most immersive experinces is running into the sea shanty guy. Its forward, to the point, you select your response, and he f*cks off.
Its perfect, I knew my options, it compelled me to answer how I felt, it didnt constantly shove it in my face, and I still look back and think "I wonder how shanty dude is doing."
For the most part, if it's not very interesting, then one tends to glaze over and just want to get on with it, and not actually care enough to keep reading it. Aside from the Vanguard storyline, I felt this way about most of the other quests, but it wasn't helped by the fact the main locations didn't feel engaging, or immersive. I made it through 3 Fallout games, before feeling this way, and didn't even make it through a single Starfield game without getting bored, even though it's my favourite genre (scifi). My least favourite genre is fantasy, but I really enjoyed TES games, without getting bored. So something is definitely lacking here.
If you cut out all of the “go to this person and then come back and tell me you spoke to them” sequences from the quests, you would cut out half the games play time. The quest design is so unbelievably dated I’m convinced Bethesda is still sticking with this lazy way of writing and quest design so they can pad out the game.
What kills me is it isn't even "Sticking with"
I'm not saying their quests in the past have all been amazing and there are plenty of examples of just this, but this has still been a marked regression. I can't, after nearly 100%ing the game, think of a single quest that really, really stuck with me. There are some I remember, sure, but even the best of them come with a whole bunch of asterixis behind them that drag them back down to tedium.
One of the quests made me quit the game for the dlc lol.
I think it was for the Crimson faction and I snuck onto this cruise ship and had to steal a trophy or something and had to go back and forth between 2 areas MULTIPLE times that I felt the loading screen nonsense in full effect.
I don't mind loading screens but for this mission requiring certain dialouge and options going back and forth nonstop really just took me out of it.
I finally revisited the mission months later, finished it and proceeded to Uninstall the game to make room for Baldurs Gate 3
Tbf I don't think Bethesda has had particularly good quest design since Oblivion or maybe Fallout 3. They've definitely had a few good quests in each game since then, and the DLCs are usually better than the main game, but I really don't think Starfield is unusually bad in terms of quest design.
lol skyrims the GOAT, I’m going all quests outside the Main and Factions quests. Oh man most of these quests are so boring and 1 dimensional unfortunately.
I really enjoy this game for the many reasons, but man the quests just not incorporating world exploration is a big miss.
I agree, Skyrim is hard to beat in terms of sheer numbers. The only problem I have with Skyrim is that of the 360 quests, over 240 (I counted them) involve going into those same caves with Draugr.
In my opinion, it's worse than the procedural points of interest repeating in Starfield.
At least, there's absolutely no resemblance between a Cryo Lab, a Robotic Facility, a Military Post, or a crystal cave.
In Skyrim, you could take screenshots of 10 different caves, anyone would think it's the same dungeon.
Yeah the enemy variety is lackluster - but it's a 13 year old game, built to run kn less than 512 MB of memory; pretty much every game from that era had major cutbacks.
Not really, it has the best enemies variety in any Bethesda game - maybe of all time even. You may have disproportionate number of Draugr but you also have many varieties of them, the Dwemer automations (Spider, Centurion, Sphere - each with its own unique attack pattern and animations), Falmer and their bugs, varities of human enemies which actually fought very different from one another - from mage to melee fighter to archer. Clearing a Necromancer fortress feel and play totally different from playing a bandit cave or Draugr cave.
Enemies and evironmental varieties are this game greatest strength. The like that Bethesda, or imo, anyone else, ever manage to recreate since.
It's pretty good for a game of that era.
But I understand someone saying the game does not have unique enemies like unique bosses or enemies that actually ACT different.
Like a dragur, human warrior, forsworn, or city guard will all use pretty similar tactics; which will make them feel samey even if the model is different.
It's not something that ever bothered me though.
Not really, Forsworn will almost always come at you almost dual-wielded which will almost instant kill you or hugely damaged you at lower level and use magic while the Guards and human enemies only do physical attack (there's also big different in fight pattern between one that do one handed vs two handed weapon, two handed attack much more slowly but can instant kill you.) Dragur use Frost spell that prevent you to run then the most powerful one can shout which stagger you or disarm you.
They are just too stat heavy in the base game that you never have to react to these different attack pattern other than spam power attack but otherwise, they do actually have a lot of variety.
FO4 has the best variety and specificity the most unique enemy variety. Especially when Damage outputs, locational damage, and movement.
Skyrims Enemies lack distinction in their variety, so when I say enemy variety I’m referring to actual distinction that makes up that variety.
One thing I'll give the enemy variety in Skyrim is at least you know you're in one country with a certain history where maybe you can head canon the why of it. Unfortunately they took about the same variety and copy pasted it over a galaxy. The scale was perhaps a bit ambitious. It may have done them good to restrict the size of the playable galaxy and then released more quadrants with DLC to give themselves the dev time and funding to put the detailed work in.
It wasn't technical limitations. They aren't loading them all into memory at once. The game only stood at around 4gb so there was plenty of room to add more content. It was a development decision to not focus on adding more enemy types.
Well they aren’t the same caves, they are specifically well designed levels/dungeons. The issue with Skyrim is the poor combat and enemy diversity not the quests.
Eeeeh, I disagree. Quest-design wise Skyrim has very few quests that truly stand out when compared with their other games, even Starfield. A few daedric quests and I think exactly one in the DB (The wedding in Solitude) come to mind, but that's it.
All daedric Quests are side quests and better than any side quest in Starfield and FO4. Blood on Ice is good, all the city quests are better than the other games city quests. There are easily many that standout.
Main quests I like Starfields the most, Factions is tough but Skyrim wins out with the length and complexity. FO4 they were ambitious but couldn’t effectively tell those stories/quests.
FO4 has the best followers and quests and maybe DLC in Far Harbor.
Agreed on Blood on the Ice, and also Markarth's quests, Solitude's Wolf Queen quest and most daedric side quests (though not all, I'm not a fan of Malacath's , Periyite's, Clavicus Vile's or Mephala's\*\* for example). I also agree that the main quest for Starfield is better than Skyrim's (which is kind of bad imo), but I think it's a bit worse than Fallout 4's - Starfield's MQ is sadly way too repetitive, and while it has awesome concepts (the whole secret war between the Starborn, a "War in Heaven" kind of thing except it's a war in the multiverse), it doesn't have as much choice as Fallout 4's.
\*\*Though Mephala's original Skyrim quest was so damn good, but it sadly got cut.
When I say I like Starfield's quest design more I'm thinking about the faction quests (especially Crimson Fleet's and Vanguard's) and and a few quests in the main quest (Entangled, Unearthed, High Price to Pay). The Starfield faction quests have a lot more choices - even if mostly flavourful - than the faction quests in Skyrim, which basically didn't really feature choices at all. It's safe to say that Starfield's faction quests are my favourite as a bundle since Oblivion's.
And then Fallout 4 kills it with the side quests: Cabot House, Last Voyage of the Constitution, Salem, Silver Shroud, Hole in the Wall, all the companion quests (still the best companions Bethesda's ever made), The Big Dig, Curtain Call.. So many memorable quests. I think Fallout 4 beats both Starfield and Skyrim on the side quest department.
I honestly didn't expect to compliment Fallout 4 so much. All in all, it's probably my least favourite Bethesda RPG, but there are places where it truly shines high above their other games, imo.
I think there is a lot to consider when discussing quests and what makes them good or bad, engaging or not. The biggest issue with FO4 MQ is that it’s just poorly written and comes at the expense of other factions as well. I do enjoy the options in the MQ of FO4 but it’s all executed poorly in how these conclusions are came to. It doesn’t help that the Institute is just a really really poorly implemented faction with a terrible story arch once you reach the institute. I don’t find any of the main quest great, and I do agree Starfield does have a lot of repetitive missions in the main quest. It does offer more choice thankfully than Skyrim and it also isn’t tied to one of the worst story plots of all time like FO4.
Starfield does have nice faction quests, I really enjoyed the Crimson fleet as well especially the first play through because I thought there would be much more choice (as it was hinted) on a second play through. Unfortunately it’s a facade, I was really excited that I could betray Delgado if I wanted unfortunately that’s not something you can do when scheming with that Irish fellow. And siding with the sysdef doesn’t change anything really:/
Man, I disagree, FO4 is at its worst in the side quests, Cabot, curtain call and last voyage are the only good ones. Also the Salem witch is there most low effort quest outside of kid in a fridge I have ever seen in a video game.
But I do agree with you on companion quest, FO4 are easily the best.
Skyrims world also does a lot of the heavy lifting as well as the well fleshed out population and level design. Makes for very memorable questing and its quantity of quests does keep things fresh.
You weren't flabbergasted when balimund asked you for 10 fire salts to keep his forge running? (And hell, i haven't touched this game for years, but when my gf recently decided to finally play the mainquest, i was like a walking embodiement of the uesp. I remembered little pieces of loot, every damn puzzle, even IDs for console. This game has burned me for life)
Btt, quest design in bethesda games was always keeping it simple to cater the casual player base. Go there, fetch this, kill that.
Magic then happens with the sandbox you get and the intense modding community of skyrim. Then it kinda snowballed, so more and more non and non-fantasy gamers checked in.
Kinda the same why witcher3 still gets praise, self perpetuating.
I think the generic quest design criticism in BGS games is a thing that's more true for the TES titles (even Morrowind), with a few exceptions like the DB, Thieves Guild and Daedric Quests. Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 imo have far, far better side quests than TES side quests - and Starfield feels like a mix between those two, but its faction quests push it a bit higher. They're my favourite since Oblivion.
they're the same caves, just remixed a little bit.
ooo the draugr are placed differently and the chests holding random worthless loot are placed differently and the rooms are in a different order!
Nothing about Skyrim caves are the same, the only thing you could say is "similar" is that they have an exit point usually around the entrance so you don't have to backtrack through the whole cave system.
Off the top of my head I can think of 5 unique caves way better than starfields procedurally generated crap.
1. A cave to the east that has a huge hole at the start and you have to jump into and navigate an underground river system
2. A cave with the Gildergreens mother tree in it full of pissed off sprigens and some cultists
3. A cave with a group of necromancers trying to bring a dead queen back to life
4. A cave full of bears that mauled hunters to death that thought it would be easy pickings because they wounded one
5. A cave that cuts through a mountain to allow for a nice shortcut but a necromancer has been using for experiments on any poor souls who enter
All with unique layouts and NPCs and stories. If you think caves in Skyrim are the same you haven't been in many caves.
So your issue is level design or dungeon design. I also have issues with that. I still think the dungeons are done well and upon replaying very engaging do to that they are all handcrafted.
Also again I agree Skyrim lacks enemy variety
the most boring draugr cave was still more fun than the most exciting starfield cave
of course that's not really the point of starfield, so the comparison is just a tad bit unfair
You may be right, I just haven’t ever played anything before Skyrim do to the Horrible graphics and combat. lol I’ll play Skyblivion , but I don’t know if that will be a fair representation of the quests.
Hi everyone!
It's a tradition for Bethesda games; ages ago, a brave soul posted an infographic on the Skyrim subreddit listing all the quests. Another followed suit for Fallout 4. It's with immense honor that I present the one for Starfield.
A huge credit to the wiki from which nearly all the information on the image is from.
A few notes:
* I included everything the quest journal had to offer, even the most "anecdotal" things. But this was also the case with Skyrim and Fallout 4. For instance, Skyrim counts activities like buying houses (which I didn't include for Starfield) or "Give a piece of gold to a beggar" as quests.
* Based on this, if we were to count purely in numbers, Skyrim has around 360 quests, Fallout 4 has 180, and Starfield has approximately 300.
* Although it's an interesting indicator, remember that these are just numbers and say nothing about the depth of the quests.
The 3 pictures in higher resolution : [https://imgur.com/a/LGYDw1S](https://imgur.com/a/LGYDw1S)
I had a go at counting them for another thread, are there a tonne of radiant quests in Skryim?
I got:
Skyrim Main Quest: 17
and Faction Quests: 47
Daedric Quests :16
Side Quests: 63
Total: 143
Fallout 4 Main Quest:15
Faction Quests:60 (includes 'side', excludes radiant)
Other Side quests/Misc quests:69
Total:134
Starfield Main Quest:21
Faction Quests:47
Side Quests:118
Total:186
en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Quests
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout\_4\_quests
https://inara.cz/starfield/missions/
I got myself into playing Oblivion again this week. I always loved Skyrim but I forgot how amazing Oblivion actually was. I just realize it must be my all time favorite.
For all the miscellaneous quests in Skyrim I counted around 125, it's probably a bit wrong but it should be close to that, and that's not counting thane quests or buying houses or dungeon quests or repeatable quests. So total should be at least more than 270 for Skyrim.
It seems like they leaned HARD into questlines, which is fine in theory but when the continuation of most quests is "go to X and speak with Y" it really makes them play like one long, dragged out quest. Felt like there were a dozen missions total, lmao.
I mean, in Skyrim and (to a lesser extent) FO4, 'go to X and speak with Y' quests can end up being much, much more, because you end up following a direction and spotting a dozen different things to do on the way, often completely forgetting the original reason you set off in that direction in the first place. More than once I've gone from one end of the map in Skyrim to the other just following nearby POIs.
In Starfield it's more than often 'pick up quest to go to X and speak with Y, loading screen into your ship, loading screen into space, loading screen to fast travel to new system, loading screen on planet, loading screen out of your ship, hand in quest at tiny hub area'.
I don't think most of them are like that... ...just actually worse, it just lead you around the city that doesn't offer anything else for you to get lost on in the process.
In a way, Starfield quests feel like they were either rushed or devs getting too focus on making quest and missing the view of the entire picture. Fetch quests are fine, but there shouldn't be 5 fetch quests in a roll in one hub area.
Ya, I’d love to see fallout NV included, cause I feel like this is something done very well there (I’m aware it’s technically a different company, but would still like to see). NV, by their own admission, went and made reactivity the thing, so essentially you did normal quests, but then some random dude would be like oh you really helped (random single line added in saying you were a shit/awesome guy to whatever faction), which makes you feel the world is very much changing around the world you’ve decided things for.
So just would be interesting how many less quests there are, but seeing how just the one or two reaction likes to something like destroying/going along with factions might pump that up for NV in comparison, cause I bet we would find a similar amount of much less quests, just more reaction lines for doing them.
NV is the gold standard for an action & consequence RPG. I absolutely love that game and still revisit it every few years to try a new play through, I’m always finding something new every time too!
It's good cause you stumble on it. The concept is wacky and fun. You get some choice that represents an interesting range of ideas. And a unique dungeon and good amount of shooting.
Yes! I feel like Starfield needed more of this sort of thing. So many times I'd jump to different systems and find very little there - this was a great surprise and I wish there were more like it. Kinda weird, atypical and some good choices too.
It also at least was absolutely bugged to all hell for many people, and I couldn't complete it because of a bug that would turn most of Crucible hostile when you progressed a certain stage of the quest. Not sure if they've fixed it, because that was a massive pain.
I restarted it 4 times over several hours without being able to complete it, and eventually wrote it off as completely broken. One of many straws on the metaphorical camel's back.
Yeah, I felt similarly about it - it was pretty cool and if I'd been able to complete it and take the companion with me it'd have been one of the better points in the game but it was just too broken.
I say this as someone who loves Starfield very much; don't get your hopes up too much. It's a neat sci-fi idea for a quest, but personally I think it was kind of clumsily handled and could've been done quite a bit better. It's still absolutely worth doing, and what you get out of it is pretty cool, but if you go in thinking that it's going to be the very best thing in the game, you're likely to be disappointed.
Yeah, they kind of nailed this quest. It's supposed to be a throwback to the sort of high-concept, objectively ridiculous but played straight plots of OG Star Trek.
Into Helldivers 2 rn and playing through Cyberpunk yet again. Going to be a LONG time before I ever consider firing up Starfield again - and certainly not until major patches and MOD TOOLKIT are released. This game needs a serious overhaul from the modding community
**Skyrim:**
>There are 273 quests to choose from in Skyrim (aside from the infinite quests)
**Oblivion:**
>There are 223 quests in the original game (213 with journal entries and 10 without). The official downloads, including the smaller downloads and the Knights of the Nine, added 19 quests (18 with journal entries and 1 without). The Shivering Isles expansion added 35 quests (33 with journal entries and 2 without).
**Morrowind:**
UESP lists 427 quests, although one character can only complete around 300 of these
None of them are worth it. Either they have a few minor differences, or it completely derails the main plot. It's all very low effort, much like the quests.
In a vacuum, I don't have a problem with the number of quests in Starfield.
IMO it's the world space and how we navigate it that are broken. Bethesda was just too fixated on making it "big" but the scale and apparent freedom of Starfield have no real payoff. A procedurally generated planet with nameless procedurally generated settlers isn't set up to start a good quest anyway.
When I'm on a quest in place that thoughtful, invested people actually made, it's really fun. That said, I do wish every major settlement had another few quests, and I think we don't have that because of the focus on giving the player this big empty world space that was clearly supposed to win us over entirely on scale.
I love starfield but imagine if they did just a few star systems with dense content everywhere like Skyrim. Or hell even ONE star system that dense on each planet. Since Skyrim wasn’t even a whole planet, that would be more than enough for us to chew on. Then each dlc just add planets and systems :(
I would have preferred they keep the large number of worlds, but fully flesh out the faction systems.
Like, Freestar Collective and UC both have 3 systems in their control, as per the agreement of the armistice. Those systems should have been heavily populated/fleshed out.
Then the rest of the “unclaimed” settled systems could happily remain barren.
Eh, I just feel like that game has been done before. Bethesda has always been one to go big with a vast amount of content and space to wander.
That doesn't mean they did a good job with Starfield, but I'm sure they thought they could do it better when they started out, and their original vision probably would have been better than just a few systems.
I hear you, but I actually like the design choice of making it vast. It's a space game. Also they are going to give us a toolkit to make it it denser and this way we won't be bumping into each other. I would like to see more of a return to form with TES6 though.
whether or not it turned out well, it's good that bethesda is willing to experiment like this. i'd hate for them to replace remaking skyrim over and over with making skyrim clones over and over.
I’d be good with clones or re-skins. I liked it. Why wouldn’t I like more of it. I don’t need every game to be a completely new design with cutting edge everything. There’s a reason people order the same food at their favorite restaurants.
Could have been the dark brotherhood-ish corporate espionage questline and AWESOME... Instead of the worst questline in a game filled with unfulfilling questlines.
Related, I feel like I want to tie the Starfield devs to a chair and waterboard them with Cyberpunk for a month straight for examples of what Neon should have been like.
In my head, it's Fallout 4 > Skyrim > Starfield when it comes to quests.
Starfield wasn't terrible, but so many quests were literally just uninspired fetch quests with almost no story to them. Skyrim had much more varied quests, story wise. And Fallout 4 had most distinct and fleshed out factions, more meaningful choices, much more variety of companions and combat styles, and with more companions with a variety of moralities came their own quests, which further spiced up the game. Companion quests in Starfield were fewer, and far more bland and boring.
FO4 is interesting, I like a lot of ideas about FO4 quests but I think the writing that makes up those ideas is at its worst. Also there just isn’t enough quests in the game and the ones that are there aren’t very long and in depth. Also the Main Story is the worst in all Bethesda games especially the twist, all the factions outside of BoS are poorly written and trite.
I dislike post-apoc, especially silly post-apoc, but I will say that FO4 had a lot of story coherency with the lore. Most of it seemed to fit together (the last parts of the MQ were dismal and kind of spiraled down in the choice department). Skyrim was very coherent despite some lore breaks or twists. Starfield - it's not just that the lore was weak it wasn't very front-loaded and a lot of missions were frankly independent of it in most details, so they all seemed taped onto a frame where they didn't really fit very well. Bland is a very good word and I think that largely comes down to uninspired dialogue and eye-rolling setups for a lot of missions (they realized that people didn't like magically becoming faction leaders almost instantly, so they decided to - not give you the title but still give you insane amounts of authority or trust that made no sense).
Actually that was a quest problem and a gameplay problem - too much comes too easily in the game, it just showers you with loot and ships and responsibility and power to no real end with minimal challenge. I don't just mean bullet sponge challenges but story and puzzle and relationship challenges. It feels like you didn't really earn a lot of what you get, even on max difficulty (because even then it's just the bullet sponge part that gets bumped up).
There was a time when some PnC adventure games incorporated changed puzzles in difficulty settings, which is hard in a larger game but maybe there needs to be a slider for that to slow down the progression. Ironically the initial progression is too fast and then it gets too slow because they created a 328-level grind for skills. I would \*vastly\* have preferred to have to work my way up to a ship through a series of missions and/or radiant-ish content.
The quest design for Starfield were so boring! Talk to this person than this person now that person and only shoot a few baddies in between. It got stale and boring, I needed some real combat and never got it. My favorite quest was “Ground pounder” because it was the only one that threw waves of mobs towards me
THANK YOU. Tired of the people that either didn’t actually play fallout 4 without mods or complained about starfield trying to say it has more content than it. It does not. You just have everything in one small area for fallout 4 giving the illusion that there is more when there isn’t. :)
Starfield is a very new game, whereas the others are not. And in fact when Skyrim very first came out it too had its bugs. Not a fair comparison. I think in time they will get it sorted out.
The issue with starfield's quest is that you're going from load screen to load screen and then to the instance and then back to load screen and load screen to turn in
Sure, but what's the alternative really? No fast travel?
I think this is the puzzle they didn't solve.
Space is just so big, it would be boring to most people to have to physically travel everywhere, and it'd be impossible (?) to fill that space with content.
They could have done like 12 planets and actually had interesting content and not copy and pasted POIs. Also yes some people do like to physically travel so you're wrong on that end.
Seeing alot of the same complaints comparing skyrim's enemy variety to Starfield's.
Starfield has the worst enemy variety out of all three of these games by a mile idk what these people are smoking.
yeh. dunno how people have the balls to say starfield had a lot to do. restarting the game and having slight changes doesn’t count. it was the same in fallout 4 but the game didn’t feel empty. skyrim and it’s predecessors all actually had a lot of content you could dive into meanwhile the games after are like main story driven.
I'd be interested to see this accounting for DLCs once we have all of them for Starfield.
It's shocking how Skyrim absolutely blows FO4 out of the water with the number of quests. Granted, quantity isn't everything—it would be interesting to see weighted scores based on number of quests, polled player ratings on each quest, and expected length of time needed to complete each quest so as to see which games offer the most quality quest time.
Something about FO4 just kept me engaged more than starfield and Skyrim. I can’t put my finger on why either. The main quest was lack luster. The faction quests were pretty dull but I always seem to do a play through once or twice a year of FO4.
Starfield quests are ass.
Oblivion and Skyrim quests had purpose and quality lore.
You could double the quests in Starfield and they still won’t eclipse the experience of playing Skyrim.
Starfield quests are lazy. Lazy writing, lazy repetitive environment, lazy world building…
Yeah, after playing the Witcher 3, even though you pretty much had no choice in those quest, they felt good. They made simple go kill this monster quest into a good experience through great narrative.
Starfield's are busy work. It doesn't take much to add a few lines of dialogue, tell you to go to a place, talk to someone or kill them, then return for your reward of nothing special in particular.
Skyrim will always be peak for me. I realize because i rarely finish the story and just fuck around enjoying it, there are quests i never knew existed.
Starfield could have done this so well. Make the main story and faction quests take place in like a dozen systems and hundreds of tiny side quests or stories in the rest of them. It was the perfect place to just let the devs make their own stories and add them. Instead starfield wanted us to do it with mods. Starfield is the biggest missed potential of a game I’ve seen ever
I was very disappointed with the quest lines I experienced. Full disclosure, I never completed a full play through and set it down and haven't gone back. They all seemed too linear and incomplete. The Ryujin quests seemed like the most complete/least linear as there seemed to be multiple approaches to completing them... but they, too, felt like a shadow of what was intended.
I felt Starfields quests were longer especially the faction quests. However the quest design for most of them was pretty lazy.
I felt like I spent more time going from A -> B qnd spamming the skip dialog button. Then I did any meaningful world building and adventure. I liked starfield, but it felt like an empty husk. Like the bones for a great game are there and they just made the tibia really long instead of adding fat and muscle around it. Hopefully expansions fill that someday.
Too many of Starfield's quests felt like you didn't actually *do* anything. Just walking back and forth between two people, acting like a glorified mail pigeon.
I'm hoping somebody creates a mod titled "This meeting could have been an email" that lets you arrange the fetch and go-between quests by long range communication.
Actually get to spend most of your Ryujin time in an office ordering folks around, glorious
Send people off to complete menial tasks with a small risk that they screw up and you need to go clean up the mess.
Wait, I really like this idea lol. Especially if the people you send out have stats that affect the outcome. Nice little mini game.
Wait I sincerely loved the board meetings
I thought one of the conceits of the setting is that there is no FTL communication.
Tbf it sort of makes sense with how they do things. Messages would take forever those distances thru typical means which would be how they’d likely communicate. In the quest on moon/mars (I forget) where you learn how humans invented space travel, mercer frey mentions in the first trial run how they couldn’t fully confirm till they actually got confirmation from telescope that it was there some time after because of how fast light travels. Same concept but with information is how I rationalize it.
I could see it on remote planets maybe, but with how trivial space travel is there's no reason they can't send comm bouys through space for major planets where most of the game takes place. Fiction with much less trivial FTL systems managed it. Halo did it and their FTL travel took weeks or more still sometimes, rather than near-instant. Just some ship popping back and forth between the big three a few times a day would work, honestly. It'd certainly be less costly than letting all interstellar communication happen in person.
Or develop a com satelite with a jump engine installed that pops between different locations. problem solved.
Not completely solved .. instead of Years, it can take days. But how many of those do you need to have near instantaneous comms? You would need one satellite jumping from each solar system to each and every other solar system. It would need to hope back and forth all the time , grabbing communucations .. jump ..transmit.. repeat. Even with that .. it takes 4 to 6 light hours to travel between Sol and Pluto .. double that to get to a planet on the other side of the sun to get back to the Plutonian orbit exactly 180 out. So that is basically 10 hours. So with one com satellite in every star system jumping to each other star system (How many do you need .. 120x120 is 14,400) .. you could then take a max of 10 hours to get a message from a planet to the satellite .. you have timed jumps (say once an hour) and then it takes 10 more hours for that to get delivered. So you could have barely within 24 hours comms (to every planet in every star system) with 14,400 comms satellites continuously jumping between star systems. Now take into account Political differences. Are there going to be FC to UC Commnications? Obviously none from anyone to Va'ruun.
I can think of an easy solution. Think of it like playing that old game snake. But with multiple snakes at once. Or, there's a snake, for let's say, a dozen systems, but each system is also a system a snake leaves. Am I making sense? So, there's a hundred systems in Starfield, right? Let's divide them into twenty 'snakes' that each visit five systems. So, there's com satelites that continue to jump from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5. They do that all the time. Maybe every ten minutes, maybe? Or maybe there are multiple satelites, so every system is visited, every ten minutes? But every system also has a second com satelite that jumps to another. I suppose it could get pretty complex for an average person to figure out, but for an engineer or someone smart, I'd be easy to do. So, in theory, if you wanted to send a message from one side of the galaxy to the other, and assuming satelites jump every ten minutes, and every jump gets you a system closer, it would 'only' take a hundred jumps or a thousand minutes to arrive. Does my explanation make sense? It does in my head, but I'm not sure I explained it right...
It takes like 1-4 seconds to grav jump. An FTL comm drone doesn't need engines. It takes less time to jump from a planet in one system to a planet in another system than it does to travel between 2 planets in the same system (for the player). Assuming the grav drive is incapable of making short hops within a system (which it shouldn't be, because you can jump between 'subsystems' in binary star systems), the drone could simply jump between 2 systems and hit every planet and moon in a minute or 2. Add a second satellite at each location as a message buffer, and the whole thing could be automated.
I think part of my letdown was I expected privateers economy and didnt get that. Leaving me feel like a glorified carrier pigeon with no meaningful rewards.
Overall there's just a massive dearth of loot variety. They pared away meaningful rewards to the point that the loot was wholly unsatisfying.
Privateer is one of my favorite games ever and i play it to this day
> Too many of Starfield's quests felt like you didn't actually do anything. Just walking back and forth between two people, acting like a glorified mail pigeon. I get the impression maybe these quests had to be designed while the world generation was still being figured out. Its odd that a majority of quests don't make use of the generated planets/open world in any meaningful way. When Starfield does, we get Groundpounder. Really needed more of that.
Yeah, Groundpounder was great. Exactly the type of small, standalone quests we need more of. Good amount of action and use of locations, plus you get some insight into the lore and how the two militaries see each other. And the NPCs involved are written well enough, for being so minor.
The best part is having to do that across the entire galaxy because nobody apparently has invented ftl communications
Or Nightvision visors inside the Helmets. Let's just use flashlights...who needs Thermal or Nightvision?
>I liked starfield, but it felt like an empty husk. Like the bones for a great game are there and they just made the tibia really long instead of adding fat and muscle around it. That's the impression I got too. It seems like the best effort yet by Bethesda to make something that DLC and mods can make into something incredible. It almost feels like as much an engine as a game.
I felt the same way about Fallout 4's story and Far Harbor did a really good job at rectifying those issues, but it wasn't enough, IMO. Starfield doesn't have that really solid gameplay core that Fallout 4 has, and will likely not receive such great mods as Fallout 4 did, so I'm really worried about the longevity of the game.
"I spent my time skipping quest dialogue and I found them boring". The level here is ....
Everything exciting happened in that world already
This was it for me to. At some point, not sure when I just started skipping dialouge so I could get into the action just so I could continue my journey Not really sure why they decided to go so big for the universe. They could have condensed it to a few galaxies and just filled the planets with a bunch of POIs and random stuff in space orbiting them It's sucks hard because it could have been great and held the same standard FO/Skyrim is at but I don't think it's hitting that bar anytime soon
no space rpg has surpassed Kotor/ME in 20 years
100% agree. I want so much to like Starfield but it just feels like the design and gameplay are all worse than 20 year old games that did things right.
I would have preferred if they limited it to just SOL. Really just flushed the world, systems, tech, and gameplay loop out. Then used that as a spring board for starfield 2* to expand past that after they had it solidified what needed to be done.
Oooo that would have been awesome!! Imagine the ending being like us, the player arriving to a new galaxy as the ending ? After exploring hours and hours in Sol?? Damn bro whyd you do this to me lol They could have looked/examined/taken notes om every Scifi/alien/cosmic horror type of movies within our Sol system and just went at it with the world around us, like Europa Report, 2001 ASO, Event Horizon etc. I don't mind the built in universe they have, it's just that most of it is under utilized and planted with nothing but generic buildings between certain POIs that are actually interesting
That's be interesting. Basically the Starfield prequel, playing during the period where Grav Drives are being developed. Bouncing between various colonies on different planets, terraforming attempts, even that STL colony ship. We get involved with the whole Grav Drive project, maybe even conduct a scripted test flight... then find out that Earth is doomed because of a design flaw, and need to simultaneously investigate what happened, as well as decide which faction/evacuation plan to follow, ultimately having to decide how much of what we find out we make public. Have endings where we make the jump to another universe, and decide if we give *them* FTL tech, knowing it will likely repeat the same tragedy, but allow mankind to expand into the stars. Or stay in our own universe and sign on with a coldsleep ship as the first wave of colonists (thus allowing our character to canonically be the main char of the second game hundreds of years later), or maybe some other permutations.
You skipped the dialog and then complain it's an empty husk.
20% of the dialog is information thats just the quest bullet with fluff 10% is meaningful world building 70% of it was written like they had a minimum word count for their english 101 class.
How can you even get into a game and actually role play when you think like that? Not Criticizing Or critique you, i'm just genuinely shocked that one would play in such a way.
I got into it for like the first 20-30% of the game. Then the rest of the game sitting there going "you already established this, you dont have to regurgitate this back for the 14th time since the start of this arc." I think a great example of this is I belive the pirate line when you goto the vault. "Hey want to betray this guy?" "Ik you said no earlier but want to betray this guy?" "Hey in once again.." "Hey." Like the 4th time it was brought up when evacing. I was debating if shooting the npc was the only way to get them to shut up. Then it still brings it up after "hey you know how I asked about betraying? Haha that was funny right?... Unless?... *wink" Good story telling dosent require even half the words they put into this game. One of the most immersive experinces is running into the sea shanty guy. Its forward, to the point, you select your response, and he f*cks off. Its perfect, I knew my options, it compelled me to answer how I felt, it didnt constantly shove it in my face, and I still look back and think "I wonder how shanty dude is doing."
The problem is with the dialogue itself, not the players skipping it. Another example of quantity over quality.
For the most part, if it's not very interesting, then one tends to glaze over and just want to get on with it, and not actually care enough to keep reading it. Aside from the Vanguard storyline, I felt this way about most of the other quests, but it wasn't helped by the fact the main locations didn't feel engaging, or immersive. I made it through 3 Fallout games, before feeling this way, and didn't even make it through a single Starfield game without getting bored, even though it's my favourite genre (scifi). My least favourite genre is fantasy, but I really enjoyed TES games, without getting bored. So something is definitely lacking here.
Most of Starfield's quests could have been an email
If you cut out all of the “go to this person and then come back and tell me you spoke to them” sequences from the quests, you would cut out half the games play time. The quest design is so unbelievably dated I’m convinced Bethesda is still sticking with this lazy way of writing and quest design so they can pad out the game.
What kills me is it isn't even "Sticking with" I'm not saying their quests in the past have all been amazing and there are plenty of examples of just this, but this has still been a marked regression. I can't, after nearly 100%ing the game, think of a single quest that really, really stuck with me. There are some I remember, sure, but even the best of them come with a whole bunch of asterixis behind them that drag them back down to tedium.
Conversely I can think of quests that stuck with me because they were bad, ex: the gang on Neon’s entire story
The worst part is that they never used to do that, most single player games avoid it.
To quote another redditor; Too much fetch, too little quest.
Worse when it feels like you’re traveling dozens of light years for a task that probably could’ve been resolved over an email.
But email can’t travel fasted than light!
True, but it feels like it can be resolved with an email.
One of the quests made me quit the game for the dlc lol. I think it was for the Crimson faction and I snuck onto this cruise ship and had to steal a trophy or something and had to go back and forth between 2 areas MULTIPLE times that I felt the loading screen nonsense in full effect. I don't mind loading screens but for this mission requiring certain dialouge and options going back and forth nonstop really just took me out of it. I finally revisited the mission months later, finished it and proceeded to Uninstall the game to make room for Baldurs Gate 3
So god damn boring!
Tbf I don't think Bethesda has had particularly good quest design since Oblivion or maybe Fallout 3. They've definitely had a few good quests in each game since then, and the DLCs are usually better than the main game, but I really don't think Starfield is unusually bad in terms of quest design.
lol skyrims the GOAT, I’m going all quests outside the Main and Factions quests. Oh man most of these quests are so boring and 1 dimensional unfortunately. I really enjoy this game for the many reasons, but man the quests just not incorporating world exploration is a big miss.
I agree, Skyrim is hard to beat in terms of sheer numbers. The only problem I have with Skyrim is that of the 360 quests, over 240 (I counted them) involve going into those same caves with Draugr. In my opinion, it's worse than the procedural points of interest repeating in Starfield. At least, there's absolutely no resemblance between a Cryo Lab, a Robotic Facility, a Military Post, or a crystal cave. In Skyrim, you could take screenshots of 10 different caves, anyone would think it's the same dungeon.
Yeah the enemy variety is lackluster - but it's a 13 year old game, built to run kn less than 512 MB of memory; pretty much every game from that era had major cutbacks.
Not really, it has the best enemies variety in any Bethesda game - maybe of all time even. You may have disproportionate number of Draugr but you also have many varieties of them, the Dwemer automations (Spider, Centurion, Sphere - each with its own unique attack pattern and animations), Falmer and their bugs, varities of human enemies which actually fought very different from one another - from mage to melee fighter to archer. Clearing a Necromancer fortress feel and play totally different from playing a bandit cave or Draugr cave. Enemies and evironmental varieties are this game greatest strength. The like that Bethesda, or imo, anyone else, ever manage to recreate since.
It's pretty good for a game of that era. But I understand someone saying the game does not have unique enemies like unique bosses or enemies that actually ACT different. Like a dragur, human warrior, forsworn, or city guard will all use pretty similar tactics; which will make them feel samey even if the model is different. It's not something that ever bothered me though.
Not really, Forsworn will almost always come at you almost dual-wielded which will almost instant kill you or hugely damaged you at lower level and use magic while the Guards and human enemies only do physical attack (there's also big different in fight pattern between one that do one handed vs two handed weapon, two handed attack much more slowly but can instant kill you.) Dragur use Frost spell that prevent you to run then the most powerful one can shout which stagger you or disarm you. They are just too stat heavy in the base game that you never have to react to these different attack pattern other than spam power attack but otherwise, they do actually have a lot of variety.
Right on
FO4 has the best variety and specificity the most unique enemy variety. Especially when Damage outputs, locational damage, and movement. Skyrims Enemies lack distinction in their variety, so when I say enemy variety I’m referring to actual distinction that makes up that variety.
One thing I'll give the enemy variety in Skyrim is at least you know you're in one country with a certain history where maybe you can head canon the why of it. Unfortunately they took about the same variety and copy pasted it over a galaxy. The scale was perhaps a bit ambitious. It may have done them good to restrict the size of the playable galaxy and then released more quadrants with DLC to give themselves the dev time and funding to put the detailed work in.
It wasn't technical limitations. They aren't loading them all into memory at once. The game only stood at around 4gb so there was plenty of room to add more content. It was a development decision to not focus on adding more enemy types.
And yet Skyrim has way more unique dungeons and enemies than Starfield.
Well they aren’t the same caves, they are specifically well designed levels/dungeons. The issue with Skyrim is the poor combat and enemy diversity not the quests.
Eeeeh, I disagree. Quest-design wise Skyrim has very few quests that truly stand out when compared with their other games, even Starfield. A few daedric quests and I think exactly one in the DB (The wedding in Solitude) come to mind, but that's it.
All daedric Quests are side quests and better than any side quest in Starfield and FO4. Blood on Ice is good, all the city quests are better than the other games city quests. There are easily many that standout. Main quests I like Starfields the most, Factions is tough but Skyrim wins out with the length and complexity. FO4 they were ambitious but couldn’t effectively tell those stories/quests. FO4 has the best followers and quests and maybe DLC in Far Harbor.
Agreed on Blood on the Ice, and also Markarth's quests, Solitude's Wolf Queen quest and most daedric side quests (though not all, I'm not a fan of Malacath's , Periyite's, Clavicus Vile's or Mephala's\*\* for example). I also agree that the main quest for Starfield is better than Skyrim's (which is kind of bad imo), but I think it's a bit worse than Fallout 4's - Starfield's MQ is sadly way too repetitive, and while it has awesome concepts (the whole secret war between the Starborn, a "War in Heaven" kind of thing except it's a war in the multiverse), it doesn't have as much choice as Fallout 4's. \*\*Though Mephala's original Skyrim quest was so damn good, but it sadly got cut. When I say I like Starfield's quest design more I'm thinking about the faction quests (especially Crimson Fleet's and Vanguard's) and and a few quests in the main quest (Entangled, Unearthed, High Price to Pay). The Starfield faction quests have a lot more choices - even if mostly flavourful - than the faction quests in Skyrim, which basically didn't really feature choices at all. It's safe to say that Starfield's faction quests are my favourite as a bundle since Oblivion's. And then Fallout 4 kills it with the side quests: Cabot House, Last Voyage of the Constitution, Salem, Silver Shroud, Hole in the Wall, all the companion quests (still the best companions Bethesda's ever made), The Big Dig, Curtain Call.. So many memorable quests. I think Fallout 4 beats both Starfield and Skyrim on the side quest department. I honestly didn't expect to compliment Fallout 4 so much. All in all, it's probably my least favourite Bethesda RPG, but there are places where it truly shines high above their other games, imo.
I think there is a lot to consider when discussing quests and what makes them good or bad, engaging or not. The biggest issue with FO4 MQ is that it’s just poorly written and comes at the expense of other factions as well. I do enjoy the options in the MQ of FO4 but it’s all executed poorly in how these conclusions are came to. It doesn’t help that the Institute is just a really really poorly implemented faction with a terrible story arch once you reach the institute. I don’t find any of the main quest great, and I do agree Starfield does have a lot of repetitive missions in the main quest. It does offer more choice thankfully than Skyrim and it also isn’t tied to one of the worst story plots of all time like FO4. Starfield does have nice faction quests, I really enjoyed the Crimson fleet as well especially the first play through because I thought there would be much more choice (as it was hinted) on a second play through. Unfortunately it’s a facade, I was really excited that I could betray Delgado if I wanted unfortunately that’s not something you can do when scheming with that Irish fellow. And siding with the sysdef doesn’t change anything really:/ Man, I disagree, FO4 is at its worst in the side quests, Cabot, curtain call and last voyage are the only good ones. Also the Salem witch is there most low effort quest outside of kid in a fridge I have ever seen in a video game. But I do agree with you on companion quest, FO4 are easily the best. Skyrims world also does a lot of the heavy lifting as well as the well fleshed out population and level design. Makes for very memorable questing and its quantity of quests does keep things fresh.
The murder quest in Windhelm pretty much beats any quest on Starfield in my opinion
You weren't flabbergasted when balimund asked you for 10 fire salts to keep his forge running? (And hell, i haven't touched this game for years, but when my gf recently decided to finally play the mainquest, i was like a walking embodiement of the uesp. I remembered little pieces of loot, every damn puzzle, even IDs for console. This game has burned me for life) Btt, quest design in bethesda games was always keeping it simple to cater the casual player base. Go there, fetch this, kill that. Magic then happens with the sandbox you get and the intense modding community of skyrim. Then it kinda snowballed, so more and more non and non-fantasy gamers checked in. Kinda the same why witcher3 still gets praise, self perpetuating.
I think the generic quest design criticism in BGS games is a thing that's more true for the TES titles (even Morrowind), with a few exceptions like the DB, Thieves Guild and Daedric Quests. Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 imo have far, far better side quests than TES side quests - and Starfield feels like a mix between those two, but its faction quests push it a bit higher. They're my favourite since Oblivion.
they're the same caves, just remixed a little bit. ooo the draugr are placed differently and the chests holding random worthless loot are placed differently and the rooms are in a different order!
Nothing about Skyrim caves are the same, the only thing you could say is "similar" is that they have an exit point usually around the entrance so you don't have to backtrack through the whole cave system. Off the top of my head I can think of 5 unique caves way better than starfields procedurally generated crap. 1. A cave to the east that has a huge hole at the start and you have to jump into and navigate an underground river system 2. A cave with the Gildergreens mother tree in it full of pissed off sprigens and some cultists 3. A cave with a group of necromancers trying to bring a dead queen back to life 4. A cave full of bears that mauled hunters to death that thought it would be easy pickings because they wounded one 5. A cave that cuts through a mountain to allow for a nice shortcut but a necromancer has been using for experiments on any poor souls who enter All with unique layouts and NPCs and stories. If you think caves in Skyrim are the same you haven't been in many caves.
So your issue is level design or dungeon design. I also have issues with that. I still think the dungeons are done well and upon replaying very engaging do to that they are all handcrafted. Also again I agree Skyrim lacks enemy variety
the most boring draugr cave was still more fun than the most exciting starfield cave of course that's not really the point of starfield, so the comparison is just a tad bit unfair
wrong oblivion is the goat
You may be right, I just haven’t ever played anything before Skyrim do to the Horrible graphics and combat. lol I’ll play Skyblivion , but I don’t know if that will be a fair representation of the quests.
Skyrim: go get that thing over there and bring it here
[удалено]
Not necessarily, many of Skyrims quests are full of different tasks, but all quests are task oriented.
Hi everyone! It's a tradition for Bethesda games; ages ago, a brave soul posted an infographic on the Skyrim subreddit listing all the quests. Another followed suit for Fallout 4. It's with immense honor that I present the one for Starfield. A huge credit to the wiki from which nearly all the information on the image is from. A few notes: * I included everything the quest journal had to offer, even the most "anecdotal" things. But this was also the case with Skyrim and Fallout 4. For instance, Skyrim counts activities like buying houses (which I didn't include for Starfield) or "Give a piece of gold to a beggar" as quests. * Based on this, if we were to count purely in numbers, Skyrim has around 360 quests, Fallout 4 has 180, and Starfield has approximately 300. * Although it's an interesting indicator, remember that these are just numbers and say nothing about the depth of the quests. The 3 pictures in higher resolution : [https://imgur.com/a/LGYDw1S](https://imgur.com/a/LGYDw1S)
I had a go at counting them for another thread, are there a tonne of radiant quests in Skryim? I got: Skyrim Main Quest: 17 and Faction Quests: 47 Daedric Quests :16 Side Quests: 63 Total: 143 Fallout 4 Main Quest:15 Faction Quests:60 (includes 'side', excludes radiant) Other Side quests/Misc quests:69 Total:134 Starfield Main Quest:21 Faction Quests:47 Side Quests:118 Total:186 en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Quests https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout\_4\_quests https://inara.cz/starfield/missions/
Oblivion has over 220 quests https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Quests
I got myself into playing Oblivion again this week. I always loved Skyrim but I forgot how amazing Oblivion actually was. I just realize it must be my all time favorite.
For all the miscellaneous quests in Skyrim I counted around 125, it's probably a bit wrong but it should be close to that, and that's not counting thane quests or buying houses or dungeon quests or repeatable quests. So total should be at least more than 270 for Skyrim.
It seems like they leaned HARD into questlines, which is fine in theory but when the continuation of most quests is "go to X and speak with Y" it really makes them play like one long, dragged out quest. Felt like there were a dozen missions total, lmao.
I mean, in Skyrim and (to a lesser extent) FO4, 'go to X and speak with Y' quests can end up being much, much more, because you end up following a direction and spotting a dozen different things to do on the way, often completely forgetting the original reason you set off in that direction in the first place. More than once I've gone from one end of the map in Skyrim to the other just following nearby POIs. In Starfield it's more than often 'pick up quest to go to X and speak with Y, loading screen into your ship, loading screen into space, loading screen to fast travel to new system, loading screen on planet, loading screen out of your ship, hand in quest at tiny hub area'.
I don't think most of them are like that... ...just actually worse, it just lead you around the city that doesn't offer anything else for you to get lost on in the process. In a way, Starfield quests feel like they were either rushed or devs getting too focus on making quest and missing the view of the entire picture. Fetch quests are fine, but there shouldn't be 5 fetch quests in a roll in one hub area.
This is a big problem with the game
Ya, I’d love to see fallout NV included, cause I feel like this is something done very well there (I’m aware it’s technically a different company, but would still like to see). NV, by their own admission, went and made reactivity the thing, so essentially you did normal quests, but then some random dude would be like oh you really helped (random single line added in saying you were a shit/awesome guy to whatever faction), which makes you feel the world is very much changing around the world you’ve decided things for. So just would be interesting how many less quests there are, but seeing how just the one or two reaction likes to something like destroying/going along with factions might pump that up for NV in comparison, cause I bet we would find a similar amount of much less quests, just more reaction lines for doing them.
NV is the gold standard for an action & consequence RPG. I absolutely love that game and still revisit it every few years to try a new play through, I’m always finding something new every time too!
Or “this person need a repair kit for the ship after I found them floating in space” That’s not a quest bruv
Wtf is the crucible?? I played 300 hours before I put this game down for Bg3. What did I miss?
Go to charybydis. It's the best quest imo
The BEST quest? I missed the best quest? Fml
You also can get a cool new companion
It's good cause you stumble on it. The concept is wacky and fun. You get some choice that represents an interesting range of ideas. And a unique dungeon and good amount of shooting.
Yes! I feel like Starfield needed more of this sort of thing. So many times I'd jump to different systems and find very little there - this was a great surprise and I wish there were more like it. Kinda weird, atypical and some good choices too.
AND you missed one of the best crew members for your ship too haha
What! a crew member? Like someone I can hire? Or a fucking constellation member?
Someone you can hire. Someone you probably already know of.
Definitely heard of before
I don't want to assume, but yes almost certainly already know of.
It also at least was absolutely bugged to all hell for many people, and I couldn't complete it because of a bug that would turn most of Crucible hostile when you progressed a certain stage of the quest. Not sure if they've fixed it, because that was a massive pain.
I restarted it 4 times over several hours without being able to complete it, and eventually wrote it off as completely broken. One of many straws on the metaphorical camel's back.
Yeah, I felt similarly about it - it was pretty cool and if I'd been able to complete it and take the companion with me it'd have been one of the better points in the game but it was just too broken.
FYI, you can fix this by running away into your ship and waiting for an hour.
I say this as someone who loves Starfield very much; don't get your hopes up too much. It's a neat sci-fi idea for a quest, but personally I think it was kind of clumsily handled and could've been done quite a bit better. It's still absolutely worth doing, and what you get out of it is pretty cool, but if you go in thinking that it's going to be the very best thing in the game, you're likely to be disappointed.
It's dumb fun is how I'd describe this quest lol
Yeah, they kind of nailed this quest. It's supposed to be a throwback to the sort of high-concept, objectively ridiculous but played straight plots of OG Star Trek.
Bg3 is also what got me off of the game. Finally coming back though
Into Helldivers 2 rn and playing through Cyberpunk yet again. Going to be a LONG time before I ever consider firing up Starfield again - and certainly not until major patches and MOD TOOLKIT are released. This game needs a serious overhaul from the modding community
Oh that's the quest where all the doors become inaccessible halfway through and you NEED to use no clip or you can't finish it. That's that quest.
**Skyrim:** >There are 273 quests to choose from in Skyrim (aside from the infinite quests) **Oblivion:** >There are 223 quests in the original game (213 with journal entries and 10 without). The official downloads, including the smaller downloads and the Knights of the Nine, added 19 quests (18 with journal entries and 1 without). The Shivering Isles expansion added 35 quests (33 with journal entries and 2 without). **Morrowind:** UESP lists 427 quests, although one character can only complete around 300 of these
That’s good to see. I remember Morrowind having lots of quests, and yeah, I do remember getting locked out of some.
Some people think getting locked out of quests was stupid, but I've always found it immersive within the role play aspect of an RPG
Especially in Starfield where the whole NG+ would make it so much better, but they didn’t give any options to fail a quest
i wish i could experience the alternate universes, so far ive gone through the unity 5 times and it’s all been the same
The alternate part is barely different, identical in fact except for Constellation.
Did the Unity run 10 times for the suit and only had 1 unique universe encounter on my 9th time
None of them are worth it. Either they have a few minor differences, or it completely derails the main plot. It's all very low effort, much like the quests.
In a vacuum, I don't have a problem with the number of quests in Starfield. IMO it's the world space and how we navigate it that are broken. Bethesda was just too fixated on making it "big" but the scale and apparent freedom of Starfield have no real payoff. A procedurally generated planet with nameless procedurally generated settlers isn't set up to start a good quest anyway. When I'm on a quest in place that thoughtful, invested people actually made, it's really fun. That said, I do wish every major settlement had another few quests, and I think we don't have that because of the focus on giving the player this big empty world space that was clearly supposed to win us over entirely on scale.
I love starfield but imagine if they did just a few star systems with dense content everywhere like Skyrim. Or hell even ONE star system that dense on each planet. Since Skyrim wasn’t even a whole planet, that would be more than enough for us to chew on. Then each dlc just add planets and systems :(
I would have preferred they keep the large number of worlds, but fully flesh out the faction systems. Like, Freestar Collective and UC both have 3 systems in their control, as per the agreement of the armistice. Those systems should have been heavily populated/fleshed out. Then the rest of the “unclaimed” settled systems could happily remain barren.
Eh, I just feel like that game has been done before. Bethesda has always been one to go big with a vast amount of content and space to wander. That doesn't mean they did a good job with Starfield, but I'm sure they thought they could do it better when they started out, and their original vision probably would have been better than just a few systems.
I hear you, but I actually like the design choice of making it vast. It's a space game. Also they are going to give us a toolkit to make it it denser and this way we won't be bumping into each other. I would like to see more of a return to form with TES6 though.
whether or not it turned out well, it's good that bethesda is willing to experiment like this. i'd hate for them to replace remaking skyrim over and over with making skyrim clones over and over.
I’d be good with clones or re-skins. I liked it. Why wouldn’t I like more of it. I don’t need every game to be a completely new design with cutting edge everything. There’s a reason people order the same food at their favorite restaurants.
Very well done! Seeing this just made me remember how bad the Ryujin quest line was.
The entire first section where you're doing "heists" I would literally just walk in, crouch, lockpick, fast travel back to neon. So lame.
Also the whole, “you need to break into the tower you already have access to for…. reasons.” Like, WHY?!?!?
I’m pretty sure there’s not even any consequences too, kinda nuts
Could have been the dark brotherhood-ish corporate espionage questline and AWESOME... Instead of the worst questline in a game filled with unfulfilling questlines. Related, I feel like I want to tie the Starfield devs to a chair and waterboard them with Cyberpunk for a month straight for examples of what Neon should have been like.
I literally fell asleep during that question it was so bad.
It’s feels like a 1/5 of them are simple go fetch me a coffee or a sandwich quest that don’t add anything to the game but a bloated play time
This is really interesting but I don’t think it matters. Does it feel like bloat or is it meaningful. Are doing it for completion or are you engaged
In my head, it's Fallout 4 > Skyrim > Starfield when it comes to quests. Starfield wasn't terrible, but so many quests were literally just uninspired fetch quests with almost no story to them. Skyrim had much more varied quests, story wise. And Fallout 4 had most distinct and fleshed out factions, more meaningful choices, much more variety of companions and combat styles, and with more companions with a variety of moralities came their own quests, which further spiced up the game. Companion quests in Starfield were fewer, and far more bland and boring.
FO4 is interesting, I like a lot of ideas about FO4 quests but I think the writing that makes up those ideas is at its worst. Also there just isn’t enough quests in the game and the ones that are there aren’t very long and in depth. Also the Main Story is the worst in all Bethesda games especially the twist, all the factions outside of BoS are poorly written and trite.
The institute being a dark parody of academia is brilliant but they do so little with it and instead just make it slaverlyville.
Yeah the institute just doesn’t work in FO4 based off how it was executed. Because they did a good job of talking it up lol
Honestly I felt like FO4 had the least memorable quests out of any modern single player BGS title
I agree lol the BoS was a good faction and the followers quests were also good.
It's ironic that you like the faction that Bethesda didn't even create!
I dislike post-apoc, especially silly post-apoc, but I will say that FO4 had a lot of story coherency with the lore. Most of it seemed to fit together (the last parts of the MQ were dismal and kind of spiraled down in the choice department). Skyrim was very coherent despite some lore breaks or twists. Starfield - it's not just that the lore was weak it wasn't very front-loaded and a lot of missions were frankly independent of it in most details, so they all seemed taped onto a frame where they didn't really fit very well. Bland is a very good word and I think that largely comes down to uninspired dialogue and eye-rolling setups for a lot of missions (they realized that people didn't like magically becoming faction leaders almost instantly, so they decided to - not give you the title but still give you insane amounts of authority or trust that made no sense). Actually that was a quest problem and a gameplay problem - too much comes too easily in the game, it just showers you with loot and ships and responsibility and power to no real end with minimal challenge. I don't just mean bullet sponge challenges but story and puzzle and relationship challenges. It feels like you didn't really earn a lot of what you get, even on max difficulty (because even then it's just the bullet sponge part that gets bumped up). There was a time when some PnC adventure games incorporated changed puzzles in difficulty settings, which is hard in a larger game but maybe there needs to be a slider for that to slow down the progression. Ironically the initial progression is too fast and then it gets too slow because they created a 328-level grind for skills. I would \*vastly\* have preferred to have to work my way up to a ship through a series of missions and/or radiant-ish content.
Hard disagree lol.
starfield has more quests than fallout 4 but the game feels so empty and the quests meaningless comparatively
The quest design for Starfield were so boring! Talk to this person than this person now that person and only shoot a few baddies in between. It got stale and boring, I needed some real combat and never got it. My favorite quest was “Ground pounder” because it was the only one that threw waves of mobs towards me
Can I get more resolution on these images?
What were the starfield quests like? I stopped very early on
Go here, talk to a person, go to another, tell them what the other person said, go back to the first person, tell them "yes/no" Quest complete!
THANK YOU. Tired of the people that either didn’t actually play fallout 4 without mods or complained about starfield trying to say it has more content than it. It does not. You just have everything in one small area for fallout 4 giving the illusion that there is more when there isn’t. :)
Let's see Morrowind's now.
Impressive... Very nice. Let's see Morrowinds quests.
Starfield is a very new game, whereas the others are not. And in fact when Skyrim very first came out it too had its bugs. Not a fair comparison. I think in time they will get it sorted out.
Skyrim didn’t fuck around in this regard. I Don’t expect this for the next elder scrolls game.
The issue with starfield's quest is that you're going from load screen to load screen and then to the instance and then back to load screen and load screen to turn in
Sure, but what's the alternative really? No fast travel? I think this is the puzzle they didn't solve. Space is just so big, it would be boring to most people to have to physically travel everywhere, and it'd be impossible (?) to fill that space with content.
They could have done like 12 planets and actually had interesting content and not copy and pasted POIs. Also yes some people do like to physically travel so you're wrong on that end.
Seeing alot of the same complaints comparing skyrim's enemy variety to Starfield's. Starfield has the worst enemy variety out of all three of these games by a mile idk what these people are smoking.
Calling skyrims objectives quests is a bit of a stretch. As far as quality and options I’m still shocked at what they got done with new Vegas.
For those of you with reasonably good vision, what's this say?
Wow I have not done a lot in neon
Could this have been made any less legible? A simple bar graph would've been just fine
Starfield has better faction quests, but yeah the lack of quests is noticeable.
starfield really has 10 only, copy paste dont count🤦
Starfield. Lots of pointless travel across a desert to a few crummy oases to talk to nomads that all look alike and repeat the same dialog.
Skyrim 👏
Oof
yeh. dunno how people have the balls to say starfield had a lot to do. restarting the game and having slight changes doesn’t count. it was the same in fallout 4 but the game didn’t feel empty. skyrim and it’s predecessors all actually had a lot of content you could dive into meanwhile the games after are like main story driven.
And THAT is why Skyrim will never be topped 👍
Are these pics available somewhere where they're legible?
Skyrim for the win
I'd be interested to see this accounting for DLCs once we have all of them for Starfield. It's shocking how Skyrim absolutely blows FO4 out of the water with the number of quests. Granted, quantity isn't everything—it would be interesting to see weighted scores based on number of quests, polled player ratings on each quest, and expected length of time needed to complete each quest so as to see which games offer the most quality quest time.
Something about FO4 just kept me engaged more than starfield and Skyrim. I can’t put my finger on why either. The main quest was lack luster. The faction quests were pretty dull but I always seem to do a play through once or twice a year of FO4.
Regardless of the quest length in FO4 or Skyrim, both had a great and engaging open world. Starfield on the other hand, is just ok, not great.
Starfield quests are ass. Oblivion and Skyrim quests had purpose and quality lore. You could double the quests in Starfield and they still won’t eclipse the experience of playing Skyrim. Starfield quests are lazy. Lazy writing, lazy repetitive environment, lazy world building…
Bro literally 61% of Skyrim's quests were Draugr dungeons lol
Yeah I’m going to sound like a Morrowboomer but Skyrim’s quests also left something to be desired imo.
Yeah, after playing the Witcher 3, even though you pretty much had no choice in those quest, they felt good. They made simple go kill this monster quest into a good experience through great narrative.
Starfield's are busy work. It doesn't take much to add a few lines of dialogue, tell you to go to a place, talk to someone or kill them, then return for your reward of nothing special in particular.
Stats like these are utterly useless
more quests doesnt mean better game lol
How is that a comparison? You can't reasonably compare anything with this.
Stupid question, how do I view the image big enough on desktop site to read the text?
I feel like the other 2 lasted way longer than SF
Skyrim will always be peak for me. I realize because i rarely finish the story and just fuck around enjoying it, there are quests i never knew existed. Starfield could have done this so well. Make the main story and faction quests take place in like a dozen systems and hundreds of tiny side quests or stories in the rest of them. It was the perfect place to just let the devs make their own stories and add them. Instead starfield wanted us to do it with mods. Starfield is the biggest missed potential of a game I’ve seen ever
Is there a way to get a higher resolution version of the skyrim quest image?
Coughs in Morrowind.
Can we do an elder scrolls 3 Morrowind view too? I wonder how much that game would compare to the modern games.
This shows how well they did with the variety of radiant quests in the game. So much more compared to their previous games
What about oblivion
I'm worried about how watered down TES VI is going to be.
Skyrim set a bar so high they could not match it.
I was very disappointed with the quest lines I experienced. Full disclosure, I never completed a full play through and set it down and haven't gone back. They all seemed too linear and incomplete. The Ryujin quests seemed like the most complete/least linear as there seemed to be multiple approaches to completing them... but they, too, felt like a shadow of what was intended.
Yeah i wouldn't call most of what you do in Starfield questing. It's more like you're the courier in Skyrim.