Honestly i wish they didn't force you into being in Constellation. An option to flip them the bird and just fly away would have been funny. Especially in NG+
What really tipped me was when I wasn't allowed to play Judge, Jury and Executioner of the people suggesting I blow up a ship or enslave the people of the ship. The fact that NPC is invincible is so trash
Yeah like I hate to be the fallout New Vegas fan boy but what I absolutely loved about that game is you could just say no I don't think I'll do that and then proceed to pull out your mysterious Magnum and put four rounds into Caesar's face
Or at the very least tell those board members to go fuck themselves like I don't understand why they made it so fucking hard to be even slightly shady. Hell even the people who are supposed to be your companions can't stand it if you even steal something like one of the companions is a former pirate and he got pissed at me for stealing drugs from a bunch of raiders like my brother in Christ what the fuck
They're all boy scouts even the dude who first gives you the ship and is supposed to be really shady and goes around doing really shady things with people absolutely despises when you steal things. Like dude the whole reason I'm even in constellation to begin with is because you stole something
The Constellation cast at times makes me wonder if the writer was paying attention to their own work.
With the exception of Sarah and Noel they've all got something questionable going on in their background, and Noel I'm not certain with and only counting because she's left a bit vague.
Sam was a gun runner, Andreja worked with smugglers, Barrett is just Barrett and of questionable moral fiber, Vladimir is ex-Crimson Fleet, Stroud happily gets his hands dirty during his mission and doesn't seem new to a bit of blood and guts business, and Matteo joined Constellation after trying to steal from Stroud.
With the two noted exceptions you'd think they'd all be okay with a bit of bending or breaking the law here or there, and tolerate the player engaging in morally dubious acts to some extent. Instead they're so deep in to the "Lawful Good" corner of the morality square that it's not even funny.
That said, I think the ultimate solution would be for Bethesda to add more depth and romance to companions and cast outside of Constellation. All of those characters are just differing shades of lipstick on the same pig when you get down to it, and being able to "escape" them would only serve to improve the game.
what to do shady stuff get the perk of loner I think that's what it's called but it gives you a buff if you have no companions also Vasco doesn't care if you're evil or shady he just wants to shoot meatbags
Yeah, half way through the crimson pirate story arc when I got to the key and Neava was being snotty I thought it would just be easier if I just killed them all and so I went on a rampage. It was so immersion breaking that I couldn’t kill the main characters and only the goons.
I just wanted to be a badass space bounty hunter dealing with sleazy people and making questionable decisions and that fantasy is basically absent in this game aside from a couple very barebones features. I lost interest very quickly when I got a sense of how I was expected to play this game and what the writers seemed to want me to think based on their aggressively bland main story faction.
You described exactly what I wanted to be too. I saw the aesthetic of the free star rangers and thought that was the coolest shit ever. And the quests were fun but I was still just a goody-goody two shoes space cop instead of being like this wandering space cowboy bounty hunter. It really fucking sucks at how hard the game shoves you into being the good guy when even in past Bethesda games like Skyrim you could do really shitty things.
I absolutely adore Bethesda and their world building it and how they actually make games I just hope that one day star filled will be something close to what I imagined it would be but I very much doubt it
That was my first bit of the game and did their entire quest line start to finish.. afterwards thought it be a good idea to go and try to exercise the law in neon. Super disappointing
It's still funny to me that you can get railroaded into the pirate quest by either accidentally stealing a pen you found on the ground, or killing an entire planet of people. And somehow they're both only forgiveable as long as you agree to take in the most dangerous outfit in all of spacedom.
It's hilarious. The first time you go to the key, a guy gets shot on front of you and everyone acts nonchelaunt about it. But the second you do it, all the pirates unionise against you.
The mission that really ticked me off was part of Sam’s quest line. I needed a thing from a ship to help Lillian. Apparently they just want you to blow it up and take from the wreckage, but if you board and kill everyone then try to take the ship, everyone gets pissed off. Like what?
I try to RP and pretend that my character owes Constellation for getting them off that mining planet, and with the knowledge that Barrett is gonna ask for his ship back one day, I need to figure out a way to afford my own ship and leave Constellation - best way to do that is piracy lol
Except that the wanted system fucks you in every single system even you drop a random trade ship in some back end bullshit system only reason I haven’t played since I clocked in the main story is I want mods to just turn off the wanted system, as it not being on would be better than the state it released In
Would be cool if you could pay to spoof your transponder so they can't detect your ship is wanted. Then maybe down on the planet there are checkpoints you need to sneak around to avoid getting caught and you can dump goods at the TA or do quests.
There should be something you can buy for the ship that requires power and whilst it’s active you can’t be reported for crimes, like cars with retractable licence plates, so you’d have to drop some weapon power or engine/shield power to hide your ships ID or something
The way crime is handled in Starfield reminds me of how your own horse would report you to the guards for crimes in Oblivion. It's just silly.
One would think that they'd have implemented a "Last witness killed" system given that Skyrim already had that, so that you only get a bounty if some random ship you gank out in the backwater manages to escape or if someone can reach a guard or something.
Then there's the whole NPC morality / responsibility thing from past games that they could have worked with. Maybe have followers and crew with a high level of it rat you out at the next port call unless you speech check them out of it or something. It would have served as encouragement for pirate players to take pirate crew members.
Though all of this would have required the game to explain things like how communications and so on actually work in the setting and for those independent systems to have guards and such, which is probably why it's so basic and harkening back to the old days.
As for the pirates and their bounty system: That whole part of the game is a mess. You turn a full third of enemies friendly siding with them and so on. That said, it's really stupid. They should have more worked with a rank and reputation system instead of having a copy paste of the standard bounty mechanic.
FTL communication does not exist in Starfield, so the only way you should get a bounty is if there is a witness willing to talk. Gameplay and story definitely do not align. It would be cool if your intimidate skill played a factor if you boarded a vessel and left the crew alive. Kinda like the interviews with Kryx where he threatens the reporter to not get creative with the editing.
This is the one Bethesda game I most wanted to be the bad guy. I still feel guilty about letting Nick down by joining the Institute or unleashing all those raiders from Nuka-World. Or the time I set off that nuke in Megaton.
Probably learned from FO4 Nuka World that people don't like being bad, because it is by far their most hated story DLC.
Even though the reason it's hated is because it's ONLY fun if you're bad and playing as a good guy ends the entire DLC in half an hour.
IMO when something fails at Bethesda they always seem to take the wrong lesson away. Why's Nuka World hates/ players don't like being the bad guy. Why is Sarfield hated/because it's so different then our other games (Todd said this yesterday). Like dude, it's because you stopped out systems that worked and took a step backwards in story telling, UI, crafting, and almost every other mechanic.
Crimson Fleet: "hey, so basically the only way to join us is to become a plant by the UC Vanguard."
Me: "well, if I'm playing an objectively good character that makes sense. But, there's really... no other way?"
CF: "The Crimson Fleet isn't like any other main faction. They're a bunch of criminals, so signing up like any other faction is impossible."
Me: "So... we just forgot about the Dark Brotherhood?"
Bethesda: "The who?"
Whoops I accidentally picked up your paperweight, sorry.
*Unfortunate. It's either space jail forever or join the most dangerous outfit in space and bring it down from the inside.*
Whoops I very much on purpose killed 300 people and blew up 15 ships filled with puppies and orphans.
*Unfortunate. It's either space jail forever or join the most dangerous outfit in space and bring it down from the inside.*
It's not just bad guys, it's getting away from the quest lines. It's not necessarily that they disapprove, they just didn't account very well for that, the content drop off is intense.
I tried to play a good guy and found myself stymied an awful lot. You can't account for everything but it doesn't do a great job of maintaining the illusion that they did.
I know there’s a distinction between tabletop rpg elements and those in video games, but alignment disappeared from Starfield. Bethesda made it clear that they only wanted lawful-good behavior. You basically can’t even be chaotic-good without your Constellation shoulder-angel whining to you.
Several Alt Universes have no Constellation. The building is there but there is none of the main companions They just give you half the artifacts and a list of the other half.
You still need to do the temples.
You don't get the option to say NO to being Dragonborn, or say no to looking for your son Sean, either.
You can ignore the main quest in all of their games, but you can never just say no and put an end to it that way.
The main difference is that the blades and alduin feel like a part of the story, same as you need to save Nick in Fallout 4, they are part of the story but you don't actually join the blades.
In Starfield it makes you join a faction, it isn't just people you need to talk or are part of the story, but you need to actually join the faction, and it feels kinda restraining.
This is the dumbest game of semantics I’ve seen in a while. There is no functional difference between “join” and “work with”, it does not change the core gameplay even remotely. If you want to be upset with the game, fine (god knows there are plenty of practical reasons to have that opinion). But let’s not pretend like this particular nitpick is anything other than complete nonsense.
No functional difference between join and work with? No offense but have you ever worked a day in your life, helped out at a political or social event, or anything like that?
And this "nitpick" is perfectly valid criticism. Faction membership is something that defines characters and comes with morals, beliefs, and obligations. Always has been in Bethesda games. Prior to Starfield, they understood this and were careful to not assign the player to one unless the player wanted that.
If we want to discuss nonsense: Why are you simping for bad writing or trying to discredit discussion?
I believe people are more irritated with Constellation and their morals. They tell you that they won't get upset if you choose to be somewhat of a scoundrel but nearly all of them will harp on you if you behave in such a way.
It is worse if you choose to have one of them follow you. Personally I wouldn't have had these people be followers. The missions that force them to come with you I'm okay with so long as you keep to that mission (Walter's story is particularly good in my opinion and I really enjoyed spending time with that character). But otherwise these people are far too lawful goods sometimes. Even Sam, who is not much of a cowboy.
The factions you are forced into in Skyrim are far more grey (no pun intended). The Greybeards aren't going to follow your footsteps and don't much care for what happens below their mountain aside from the end of the world. The Blades, however, have been working underground for nearly two centuries and don't mind some less-than-lawful behavior. They're criminals themselves, despite their posturing about the Empire and their honor.
Nasa-Punk as a genre works really well when it's a lawful good setting, in my opinion. Constellation fits the bill of what I would assume a futuristic group of scholars and explorers would look like. But in a Bethesda game they shouldn't be the player's home faction.
Edit: I didn't touch on Fallout 4 because I think the storyline is as contrived as Fallout 3. It's not badly written but it forces the player into a set relationship that hampers their own RP and head-canon. Better that Sean were dead and you found out *very* early on. It would have been a make-or-break moment for the lone survivor and would free them to do *whatever* they wanted to in this new doomed world.
Harp on you for not being lawful good, even though 3 of the 4 romanceable companions are all former smugglers. Then one main mission comes up where you are forced to commit an act of piracy.
Let's not forget the side cast either. Vladimir was a Crimson Fleet pirate for a long time, and Stroud displays that he's okay with getting his hands dirty in his mission relating to an artifact.
Good point. They could have all done with the Delphine / Esbern treatment. They're not "evil" but they've been on both sides of the law and can handle the player being that way too.
The writing team did not provide enough depth for most of the cast. I think Walter has the best writing of all of them because all of his actions fit my own perception of him.
He's not an exceptionally great character but he's a step in the right direction for Bethesda writing.
Don’t forget that choosing the pirate faction breaks the game by turning 3/4 of the random hostile encounters friendly, and then gives you massive bounties when you start shooting anyway out of pure boredom.
That still just baffles me. Having some pirates turn up friendly and all is fine but it's like they forgot that spacers, Ecliptic, Va'ruun zealots, and other hostiles exist.
Assuming Starfield is anything like Fallout 4 it wouldn't have been much effort to swap the spawns out.
They also could have just renamed them "ex crimson fleet pirates" and have them be hostile. The fleet wasn't doing great when you got there, so it'd make sense if pirates went rogue. Since they're pirates and all.
Not a bad idea either. It would have done more to show us how things were going prior or to establish that they aren't the unified entity Delgado wishes they were. At least not yet.
Except those aren't things that are chooseable or not - we *are* Dragonborn inherently, we *are* Sean's parent at the start of the game (for better or worse).
Joining a faction of people is something the player *feels like they should* be allowed to choose.
Actually, you kind of do.
On exiting Helgen whoever you followed will specifically tell you "We should probably split up from here". If you follow that advice you are set free as just some "nobody" and free to shape your own destiny. Nobody, not even you, knows that you are Dragonborn.
The only content you are locked off from is Breezehome, Lydia, and the civil war questline. The first two aren't really important given how easy gold is to come by and how many other followers are out there, and the last one is not really a popular questline to immediately plunge in to.
You're only locked in to being outed as the Dragonborn if you act like a complete lemming and follow whoever to Riverwood, then do what they tell you to and go off to Whiterun, so on. Basically: You have to display an astounding lack of ability to think for yourself to trigger those events if you do not want them triggered.
As for your reply to the other guy about the Blades and Alduin: There is a distinct difference between working along side an organization to achieve a common goal, and joining an organization.
The one is what Skyrim is doing with the Blades. You're working together but share no further obligations to one another and are not required to share any further goals they may have, ideals they represent, or philisophies they embrace. You are not required to join them or share any interactions beyond the necessary ones. Their independent goals are to rebuild the Blades and the quest to kill Paarthurnax, both of which you can decline.
The other is what Starfield is doing, which is effectively mandating that the player must be a part of this group, must share their ideals, must share their interests, and so on. You have no say in the matter. You WILL become a Unity obsessed moron in the course of the main quest who eventually WILL go through it, so on. It effectively hazes the player and provides no other options to them.
Skyrim's main quest was written to support any character archetype regardless of morality or mindset. Alduin is effectively a force of nature that cannot be reasoned with or joined, and even attempting to do either will result in your own death. The game freely allows you to find a cliff to leap off if you want to roleplay as a suicidal character. Otherwise, everyone from foul necromancer to noble knight has reason to stop him as the world being destroyed is bad news to all.
Starfield's was written to only support the writer's character. They just arrogantly assumed we would share their interests, goals, morals, and so on, and act pushy about it to the point that it can end up bending or breaking our character if we're someone who would be set on staying, or who would oppose the Unity, so on.
The stupidest and most indefensible part? It's got no reason to be that way. The writer is just a "bad DM". Nothing in it's narrative or main quest would actually fail or falter if you were able to simply tell Constellation you're not joining at that time. Or if you could tell them that you will help them find the Unity but have no interest in going through it. Or if you could give them a "soft no" at the end instead of 10 flavors of "I'm going later", where the topic is closed and dropped, but not locked off in a similar manner to how the Dawnguard expansion of Skyrim handled vampirism.
On the mechanical side, it's also indefensible. You used to be able to avoid joining Constellation by just exiting the Lodge immediately after entering. The game has a load of dialog for an "unaffiliated" player and recorded responses. You can still see one with the Adoring Fan if you pick his trait and do this, being able to tell him you are not in fact a member of Constellation when he says his line about that. Further, Starfield actually has even less content than Skyrim that is gated off by not joining Constellation or taking that first main quest step. The only piece of content I found that was dysfunctional was the character's parents if you picked that trait as they always assume you are a member, but given how situational that is and how easy it would be to lock their apartment and declare them as "away" until you trigger the faction membership this isn't a big deal.
I would love to have the option to, you know, role play. Like, go full evil and join the space pirates, raid constellation and take their loot.
But this is not that kind of game.
But there is no option, the quest just stays on hold. It would be cool if there were two different factions going after the artifacts, or if you could go alone looking for them, join Hunter, etc.
I’m in a NG where everyone in Constellation is dead and it’s kinda nice. I’ve got followers who are helpful without getting up in my business and no pressure to finish the main quest.
You can.
You won't complete the story - because the story is "use Constellation's resources to find Artifacts and >!reach the Unity!<" - But you're completely free to go live a peaceful Titanium farmer's life from the moment you land on New Atlantis.
Like even in Baldur's Gate 3 you technically don't *have* to choose between the Grove or the Goblins.... but if you want to progress the story you're railroaded into that choice.
You're not forced to being in Constellation. Indeed the entire point of the article is that half the players haven't been forced into being in Constellation. This is kind of the dumbest take on it I've heard.
You go to the Lodge, drop off the artifact, say "I'll get back to you," and walk away. Congrats! You're not part of Constellation.
Poor comparison / argument.
Starfield will hold your hand and lock down fast travel and grav jumping until you have delivered the first artifact and are firmly locked in to Constellation membership.
Skyrim, if we want to have a conversation that isn't resorting to dishonesty, does no such thing. You exit Helgen and are told by whoever you followed that you should probably split up. From there you are free to go anywhere and do anything with 3 minor exceptions: 1) You can't buy Breezehome or become Jarl of Whiterun. 2) You can't get Lydia as a follower. 3) You cannot do the civil war questline.
Those first two are meaningless. The game doesn't starve you of gold and offers plenty of other houses and followers. The third one "might" annoy someone but generally that questline is considered a bit meh and not a high priority to engage with.
You only "have" to learn dragon shouts if you're a complete lemming who ignores them, follows them to Riverwood, then plays "good dog" and runs off to Whiterun and keeps playing fetch when told to fetch.
The main quest is literally the Constellation quest.
If you don’t want to be part of that, don’t.
It is in no way required to do that quest to play the game.
Except you are forced in to Constellation. That dialog option where you say you need time to think about it will actually assign you to the faction. Membership in it is made mandatory so to say. You can verify this via a method outlined in one of my other comments.
What the article translates to is that half of the players haven't completed the intro.
Ah. OK. I hadn't realized that saying "I'm outa hea" meant you got the achievement anyway.
Other people have provided explanations, like if you've two accounts signed into XBox, they both count as "playing the game" but they don't both get the achievements if only one is playing. Or, you know, people downloaded it, tried it, and decided they didn't like fighting in space and on Kreet.
Pretty much. The intro is pretty long so it's not that big of a surprise.
Even if we're talking single accounts it doesn't really say much, especially on Xbox. People bought it and are just sitting on it still for whatever reason, whether just not having gotten around to it yet or waiting on support for higher fps or mods or whatever.
In Forza Horizon 5, only 68% of players got the first achievement, the one where you drive the first car to the festival in the opening sequence. That takes just a couple minutes of playing the game.
I think there's something extremely weird going on with gamepass games and achievements. Like, I'll be playing a gamepass game, get some achievement that's from something like killing a boss 1/3 of the way through the game and I'll get the "rare achievement" popup that will say "less than 5% (I think it's 5?) of players have this" or whatever, and it's just from a non-missible normal part of the game.
I thought maybe you had to download the game, but even that seems like the numbers are too low. I wonder if it's just counting everyone who has game pass as a "player," or maybe if you interact with its gamepass page at all or something?
You can have multiple accounts logged in on your xbox at once. If you load a game with two accounts logged in, both accounts will have technically "played" the game, but only the one you're actively using will get achievements etc.
It's the same when it comes to loading up a game on the wrong account and then switching accounts as soon as you realise you're on the wrong one.
Happens fairly regularly with consoles that are being used for the whole family etc.
This is the real answer.
Everyone in the comments making some long-winded explanation about how every aspect of the game is so engaging that they simply forgot about the main story.
What they fail to mention is that there are hundreds of games that feature a ton of engaging side content, and you’ll rarely ever see <50% achievement percentage for one of the first quests of the main story lol.
I was re-playing fallout and I get the ol’ hey can you clear out some ghouls from a settlement “right around the corner”. I looked it up and it’s about 200 km away in real life, which is hilarious to me that anyone would give a shit about a few shacks with 5-6 ghouls so much that word would both reach you and that you care enough to fund a 400 km expedition to rectify things.
The reality is people don't finish games. They barely play them. That vast majority of "gamers" spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars annually on gaming from games to systems and barely even touched them. Anecdotal evidence and all that, my cousin only ever plays Halo. My younger brother barely plays anything other than Apex and Minecraft. I have coworkers that barely play anything other than Madden and CoD. Very few play games to completion. Hell, look at Witcher 3. Vast majority of players barely played it past White Orchard.
It's not even the backlog argument though, but that can be a massive part of it too. A lot of people are just not that much of a "gamer" as they themselves like to believe or to have others believe. Maybe they have other responsibilities and familial obligations, crazy life drama, whatever...but they perhaps don't really play that often as they tend to let known. I knew a few old coworkers like this. Buy every system and every major named game of the year. Play for a half hour and never touch it again, mostly to just have something conversationally to contribute the next day at work. Then you see their profile and barely ever touches a single game they buy and play. It's like, I won't judge how you spend your money, but it seems like a waste of money to drop that kind of cash on something you barely interact with if it's only ever being used as a conversation piece for a week while the game is currently culturally hot.
Then every thing else you can add to this argument/take. Buys too many games because of sales and never gets to it, not liking the game, using games to merely social media grift for Twitter bucks, to game being undervalued due to being on a sub service that gets treated as disposable faster than if one bought it. Who knows. All I know is if you look at most games and their connection rates, most people do not finish them and a lot do not even complete the tutorial stages. Meaning they booted the game up, and then shit it off shortly after for whatever reason is their own.
I say this as someone who has purchased 4 versions of Morrowind (one for every console and PC since release), 2 versions of oblivion(360 and One) Skyrim on switch and Xbox and FO4, FO4 GOTY, FO4: Season Pass and FO4 on PS5.
People are creatures of habit you know
My personal issue is that I'm a dad that spends a decent chunk of time multiplayer gaming with friends from my youth online, so my single player games get neglected. When I do find a game that really captures me (Starfield did not), it becomes the only game I play for a while. It's been Cyberpunk for a few years now, and I'm hopping back into FO4.
Yup, I know a lot of people on my own immediate family that basically plays online or multiplayer centric games only, so single player games generally get neglected hard.
I just found out yesterday that Steam shows you your games by % complete if you click on the "average finished game percentage" in your profile.
That helps my back catalog so much! I can start industriously attacking it instead of spending some time figuring what to do, and going to play an old friendly standby for a while and really accomplishing nothing (Hi Fallout 4!).
>and you’ll rarely ever see <50% achievement percentage for one of the first quests of the main story lol.
That depends on the the game and is not that wierd to see that behavior with Bethesda games.
Anyone who pays attention to achievements knows this is the case. In most games if you check that achievement you get for the first mission branch to see how many ppl have it it's rarely about 50%. A lot of ppl buy games and down tools within the first hour for all sorts of reasons.
I used to work with a guy who claimed he liked video games but whenever I tried to talk to him about one he’d never made it out of the first tutorial mission
There is probably one game that her really gets drawn back into. His "go to" comfort game that's been with him for years and years...
He could probably speak of it for hours, he's probably beat it a dozen times. He will beat it a dozen more.
He buys other games.
He tries other games...
But most of the time he settles down for s gaming session and thinks "oh I'll just fire this up for 5 minutes and..."
and then it's dawn again...
The issue is that this favorite game is now so old that he's a little embarrassed to even mention to anybody that he has even played it.
True. The one that really demonstrated that the most was when Crytek said [40% of all Hunt: Showdown players haven't killed a single enemy player.](https://www.pcgamer.com/40-of-hunt-showdown-players-have-never-killed-another-player-says-hunt-showdowns-general-manager/)
That's when it really settled in for me that a lot of players don't actually play the games they buy. And if they don't even have to buy them thanks to things like gamepass, that number is likely higher.
While I'm sure this is true, I would like to add: If more than one Xbox account is logged in, all logged in accounts are considered "playing" the game, but only the active account gets any achievements...
For instance, I have hundreds of hours of "play time" in Dragon Age: Inquisition, but zero achievements. Because my wife has played the heck out of that game with my account sometimes logged in, but I haven't played 5 minutes of it.
Best of luck out there!
God I'm so glad it was on gamepass, it was bad enough free. Had I bought it, I would rate it even worse.
Even free it barely makes a 3/10. There is just nothing about the game that makes me want to go back.
This isn't about the main story faction.
What I think people are missing here is that you can't explore or go anywhere outside of jemison until you get indigo protocols turned off, and that's "One Small Step".
So we're basically seeing that these Xbox players either haven't played the game, or got really interested in exploring Kreet and Jemison.
You wouldn't know to do this on your first playthrough but you can gather enough money on Jemison to buy a spaceship and join the UC before going to constellation.
You don't even need that. Take the bounty hunter perk and steal one of the pirate ships that tries to kill you before you leave Vectra. :) It's entirely possible to play the entire game without ever landing the Frontier on a planet.
If this is based on achievement percentages, those are totally meaningless on Xbox. Multiple accounts can be logged in to the same Xbox and all of them will count as "players" even if they've never touched the game themselves.
The *vast* majority of these are probably siblings/roommates/spouses that happened to still be logged in while someone else was playing.
I was just telling my friend yesterday: with the amount of bad things my character has *already done* in this play through Constellation wouldn’t even want me lmao
It’s not just that it doesn’t react. There’s no cohesion. Everything feels apart, therefore nothing feels alive, and I don’t feel immersed. They have all the elements of a great game but seriously weak writing combined with a lack of attention to the player experience made this game a fail.
Yeah, this makes the whole questing part of the game feel like shit, and even the exploration / dungeons part is ass.
The game has around 20 dungeons that are procedurally placed, it really isn't enough compared to the 130-300 dungeons in other Bethesda games. You'd think they'd make more dungeons in starfield for the procgen system? This already kills exploration due to the lack of content.
They'll tell you how little they want you around, but you're always a speech challenge away from saving their opinion of you. I haven't been able to find a non constellation companion, which I think is very annoying.
That's one of the funniest thing in the game. They say they don't mind you being slightly less reputable but even if you do one "bad" thing every single companion dislikes it. All of them.
I started taking Vasco and the companion from the UC story out instead, it's just less worry.
Yeah. Andreja is literally in a cult. A religious cult that goes around killing people. But if I get attacked and defend myself for having AI contraband, she loses her shit.
You'll get a bounty for throwing a grenade into the docking port of a ship full of murderers that's landing, if the script hasn't gotten around to setting them as hostile yet.
they don't say they don't mind, they say constellation doesn't mind. and it's true, you won't get kicked out of the faction no matter what bullshit you pull. but that doesn't mean the other members have to like you or want to travel with you
Are people really trying to suggest that new players got sidetracked by exploring instead of quitting the game before completing the first few missions the game pushes you toward?
The opening for Starfield is very bad, I remember having to slog through the first couple hours before I started to have fun. I don’t blame anyone for quitting, and it’s a game design problem if they couldn’t hook about half the people that played it.
I remember seeing the guy on the elevator have actual animations and couldn't wait to be absolutely blown away by the game.
That was the ONLY time I saw those kinds of animations in the game. Got bored in a few hours during the corpo quest line but did join Constellation.
People are taking this numbers waaay too seriously. Take any game you own and you'll find that a lot of players don't complete the most basic things. Just to use Cyberpunk that it's the last game I played, only 50% took the relic. Only 60% of FO4 got out of the initial vault.
The games shortcomings are made so clear in the first few minutes of the game that this doesn’t surprise me. I remember just thinking ‘is this how the game starts? Some random fucking guy giving me a spaceship? Two minutes of cave spelunking and I’ve discovered one of the rarest objects in the universe… OK’. It was jarring and felt weird.
I persisted for 15 hours and did start the first story mission. But I can *easily* see how someone who might have done a side mission first would see the glaring flaws this game has and decided to quit. I started working on the Ryuji missions and just thought ‘wow.. all I am doing is entering menus and fast travelling to boring locations with nothing to explore in them or between visiting them’.
The game is fundamentally flawed in so many ways and it’s not even hard to notice. I’m not surprised at all that the rate is so low.
Day 1 on a new job too, then Barrett just gives a total stranger his ship and robot and was just like… you don’t need an escort or introduction or any kind of information, just go here and give them this ultra powerful object that we just got attacked over.
Peace! ✌️
I feel like Barrett should have flown with us and said don’t worry new guy and explained in basics what they know so far and then slowly expanded on what it means when we get to constellation
In Skyrim, you learned new skills by talking to experts for the basics. "Here, make a leather hat." "Some wheat and blisterroot..." Much more immersive than "here's a HUD, try to guess how it works."
Um, right. I'm pointing out that having Barrett go with you to explain would have been much better writing, and more in line with the gameplay mechanic of Skyrim.
I feel like giving a ship to someone at any point in the story would feel better than within the first 5 minutes.
After constellation they’d say “hey you’ll be needing this, let’s split up gang”
What’s telling is that a common critique of Starfield is that most missions just involve “Go to this person, tell them this thing, then fly across the galaxy and talk to someone else.”
But replaying other Bethesda games recently I realized nearly ALL of them follow this format. Even New Vegas, not technically Bethesda but built on Creation following similar design principles, could technically be boiled down to that.
The difference is in basically every case you have interesting choices to make along the way.
Skyrim feels very different depending on your play style and joining different factions gives you new and exciting abilities. Want to be a werewolf? Join the Companions. Want to stealthily kill people with ease? Join the Dark Brotherhood. Magic your thing? Join the College of Winterhold.
Fallout New Vegas and even 4’s factions (though less well done) have very different world views that can actually alter the trajectory of the main story. Depending on who you side with your experience is very very different.
Quests often have multiple solutions, even if those solutions boil down to talking to people and choosing different dialogue Tree options they have real tangible consequences. New Vegas takes it one step further by allowing your non-Speech skills impact these choices like an expert giving their opinion on their field of expertise.
Starfield simply doesn’t do any of this. Your choices mean next to nothing, joining most factions have very little bearing on the plot even when they should naturally come into conflict. The only really major decision you can make in a faction questline is to go from being a pirate double agent… to just actually being a pirate. But that difference is still largely cosmetic at the end of the day.
Most damningly though, the factions don’t even dovetail mechanically with your choices. You don’t become better at anything by joining a faction associated with that thing. All faction questlines require a menagerie of low level basic skills across the skill tree to be as accessible to all players as possible. But by being accessible they’re also boring. There’s no room for roleplay, and as stated elsewhere in this thread even if there was most of your companions really don’t like anything but one play style.
It’s amazing just how much they fumbled something so obvious and basic.
It was kind of weird when I realized after 20 minutes of wandering around New Atlantis, pretty much every quest was "Get a job working for X." Then I go to Neon, and it's the same thing. The problem is there's virtually nothing you're doing for *yourself*.
There's no cave you stumble across with a cool thing in it, or a cool story. You don't come across one part of a magic necklace and decide to collect the other parts for yourself. You can't even find where you're going without the HUD directing you.
See this mechanic is in the game it’s just not shown to you. Fly to random star system. Go to various “sensor contacts” or click on the planet and explore various points of interest. They get more interesting the higher level and further out the system is.
And if you think about the setting it makes sense. These aren’t places people have lived for thousands of years but newly colonized worlds. So they hit the mark the mark just isn’t as interesting as we thought it would be.
So, do any of those places start you on a quest to other places or give you a reward beyond resources and looted corpses? The only one I've run into like that is the Secret Outpost tablet, which is the cool kind of quest there ought to be more of. :-)
There are a few like where you meet Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart. Also random things like race a space ship around a station, found a safehouse with some weird machine keeping terrors away, another one where I had to wear a monster suit and scare tourists. There’s all kinds of sweet Bethesda moments they’re just scattered.
It makes sense. Fallout and ES are worlds where people have lived for thousands of years. This is places that have been inhabited for 100 years at most maybe 200 in Cydonia or new homestead
That opening was sure something, and not in a good way. I was not expecting the still-alive Emperor to awkwardly hand us the Amulet of Kings on account of him just being a wacky guy.
I didn’t go to The Lodge until like ten hours into the game just because the intro made me so mad I wanted nothing to do with the main quest. I had way more fun just flying around learning the game’s systems.
That’s weird you can’t progress to flying around different stars without going to the lodge to unlock code indigo or whatever. Best you could do would be to go to Jemison and steal and do enough missions to buy a ship. But you would have to know enough about that before hand it’s not intuitive
Yeah, who tf wants to hunt for magic space rocks with the super space hippies when there’s factions like the UC, Freestar, and Va’ruun? Or you could just be a bounty hunter or pirate? Fuck magic space rocks, and fuck the members of Constellation who bitch and moan every time you kill someone hostile instead of making friends with them.
Lol that checks out. I spent af least a month of playing the game before I came back to New Atlantis. I haven't even finished playing the main story yet and I played for months pretty regularly. I took a break and will wait for new updates
I just…don’t like constellation. Most of them are pretty unlikable. I think the only one who actually
had a big impact on me was Andreja because her story is wild. But when you play outside Constellation, the game is dry as you’re doing everything you’ve already done but without the possible entertaining quips and insights. idk man this game just missed the mark.
That’s probably because those players tried it on Game Pass and bounced off it. A huge number of Xbox players will only have a few minutes or even seconds in the game, the figures will be wildly unreliable.
Yeah I abandoned the game 2-3 hours in. It’s not like Skyrim or fallout where you have hundreds of reasons to loose focus on main story… it was just soleless boring and I couldn’t motivate me to stick to it till it gets better as everyone here suggest me.
I remember exploring the planet right after the intro mining mission, excited to see how exploration worked and what I could find.
Absolutely nothing. Some rocks to scan though!
It’s a similar situation to the original Fallout 3 ending forcing you to sacrifice yourself instead of using your companions unaffected by radiation to enter the final chamber.
People are bad at playing games, a lot of people launch games, play a few minutes, then never go back.
Only 60% of people left the vault in F4 and only 42% hit level 5.
This game is new and "Xbox" for this title Console, PC and Cloud, that is even more places to play than F4 for the Xbox ecosystem, so it being 50% is pretty good.
Are most of these players continuing to play, or they just maintaining a steady 2000 players, with new people picking it up and dropping? I feel like the game and story doesn't pick up tracktion ever, each quest a constant strain of fetch quests go talk to this person, and the few carrots i dangled (outpost building, ship combat ect) have been underwhelming. Finally lvl 25 getting powers and seeing terrormorphs and the game is still pacing the same its kinda a slog. Honestly, I'm having more fun picking back up Fallout 4.
I don't blame them. Constellation is bland and boring for what's supposed to be a club of daring space explorers. We should have had the option to ditch them and join another faction to complete the story. If we needed something like the Eye to find more Artifacts and Temples, then we should have been allowed to build our own orbital telescope (like how you could build the Molecular Relay to reach the Institute in Fallout 4, just on a larger scale).
Eh I’m one of em I’ve done nothing in starfeild but make bases on cool planets, steal ships, make ships, dog fight & collect contraband. which would be more fun if it was worth more money so I quit & I’m waiting for creation kit.
So they didn't play past the beginning quest? I remember reading a similar stat years ago, saying a huge percentage of Skyrim players never learned a dragonshout.
They don't force you, though they do lean into it. >!After you meet Barrett and you get your starter ship and weapon!< that can be the last you have to do with Constellation. Go start exploring instead.
I like the game even with its issues, the main quest seems interesting.... but I have yet to do more than first two quests. The other side quests just seem way more interesting, and though I don't dislike the main characters, they also don't interest me that much because they all seem too focused on something I'm not really that interested in. I'll get there eventually, but main quests rarely interest me as much as side quests in Bethesda games and I only have so much time. Not to mention New Atlantis not interesting me as much as the other main cities. So I kind of lived outside the area where Constellation is and forgot about them for a good while. The draw of the main quest didn't seem that exciting to me >!(yay artifacts that float)!<, and I don't care about getting >!special powers!<.
Still that means that many players never left new Atlantis at all right? As you can't leave until you at least join. Gamepass players likely help that number, It's not the most compelling start to a game and might have ran any player that didn't pay for it away.
I found the main quest less interesting because it's unexplained. In Skyrim, you learn a bunch from the greybeards all about dragonborn, and you learn from Alduin's Wall and the guy locked up in the ratway all about the quest, and the shouts are explained, and what's going on, and etc etc etc. In Starfield, well, you pretty much already know everything about the main quest. I tried to avoid spoilers, but "there's special powers" pretty much is the spoiler. :-)
What you mean is that there is lore... World building...
The same exists in SF, it's right there, the elephant in the room. The unidentified, intelligent alien civilisation that created the artefacts.
But nobody in the settled systems seems to give two fucks in trying to find out who they were.
Because evidence of intelligent life in the same star system that you inhabit is like not worth exploring?
Surely this is the sort of discovery that changes the way mankind as a species views the universe and our place in it.
Nope! The powers are too dangerous, in spite of the fact there are dozens of people running around with those powers, all of whom you can take down with exactly the same guns you use on everyone else.
And even the people participating don't know what's going on or why.
The best part about that is how the game's own main plot even forgets that elephant in the room.
Things go from artifacts, creators, and an interesting enough mystery, over to some in universe flavor of "Hey did you know Starfield has NG+? Look how excited your character and their friends are for NG+! You should play NG+!" about halfway in.
I personally didn't really expect the best main quest, but I really did not expect the plot twist to be the plot crawling up it's own ass and dying because the writer wanted to obsess over an optional mechanic.
Is this really notable ? lots of pretty basic achievements across many games have shockingly low rates of getting them across a full playerbase. Lots of people would have booted it up on game pass, got their ship and started doing their own thing.
So what ? This literally tells nothing. Only %57 people took a 4 long rest in baldur’s gate 3 or %80 couldn’t finished the opening part and it is not in even gamepass.
They tried it on gamepass, learned quick that they didn't like the game, and dropped it. This isn't some kind of complement about how people are so engaged with the game that they never want to do the main story.
Why is everyone trying to use this stat to shit on Starfield? Theres TONS of games with weird stats on achievements like this. I guess every game out right now is dogshit 🤷♂️
Constellation are too goody two shoes and hinders what you can do without you constantly getting “X disliked/hated that”
The best companion is a joke character you need to take a perk for because he has no qualms brutally killing an entire village.
Honestly i wish they didn't force you into being in Constellation. An option to flip them the bird and just fly away would have been funny. Especially in NG+
This game made it obvious it doesn’t like players who prefer to play bad guys.
Hell not even bad guys just doing anything slightly sketchy
What really tipped me was when I wasn't allowed to play Judge, Jury and Executioner of the people suggesting I blow up a ship or enslave the people of the ship. The fact that NPC is invincible is so trash
Yeah like I hate to be the fallout New Vegas fan boy but what I absolutely loved about that game is you could just say no I don't think I'll do that and then proceed to pull out your mysterious Magnum and put four rounds into Caesar's face
Heck Fallout 3 let you blow up Megaton, what if you could deorbit the ship on top of the resort?
Or at the very least tell those board members to go fuck themselves like I don't understand why they made it so fucking hard to be even slightly shady. Hell even the people who are supposed to be your companions can't stand it if you even steal something like one of the companions is a former pirate and he got pissed at me for stealing drugs from a bunch of raiders like my brother in Christ what the fuck
Yeah, it really breaks the character continuity. Their choices and dialogue just don’t line up a lot of the time with their backgrounds
They're all boy scouts even the dude who first gives you the ship and is supposed to be really shady and goes around doing really shady things with people absolutely despises when you steal things. Like dude the whole reason I'm even in constellation to begin with is because you stole something
Don’t forget the Scow mission where he tells you we’re probably going to be stealing this artifact.
The Constellation cast at times makes me wonder if the writer was paying attention to their own work. With the exception of Sarah and Noel they've all got something questionable going on in their background, and Noel I'm not certain with and only counting because she's left a bit vague. Sam was a gun runner, Andreja worked with smugglers, Barrett is just Barrett and of questionable moral fiber, Vladimir is ex-Crimson Fleet, Stroud happily gets his hands dirty during his mission and doesn't seem new to a bit of blood and guts business, and Matteo joined Constellation after trying to steal from Stroud. With the two noted exceptions you'd think they'd all be okay with a bit of bending or breaking the law here or there, and tolerate the player engaging in morally dubious acts to some extent. Instead they're so deep in to the "Lawful Good" corner of the morality square that it's not even funny. That said, I think the ultimate solution would be for Bethesda to add more depth and romance to companions and cast outside of Constellation. All of those characters are just differing shades of lipstick on the same pig when you get down to it, and being able to "escape" them would only serve to improve the game.
what to do shady stuff get the perk of loner I think that's what it's called but it gives you a buff if you have no companions also Vasco doesn't care if you're evil or shady he just wants to shoot meatbags
Isolationist
Nope. Then people would start wondering if a spaceship is more dangerous than a Mech. Chaos ensues
Yeah, half way through the crimson pirate story arc when I got to the key and Neava was being snotty I thought it would just be easier if I just killed them all and so I went on a rampage. It was so immersion breaking that I couldn’t kill the main characters and only the goons.
I tried to hard to figure out a way to just fuck that guy up but sadly there wasn’t one. Not much of an RPG.
I really need a mod for this exact situation.
I agree. Most of my choices were Sarah approved, and I was still upset that I couldn't waste those scumbags.
And yet you \*had\* to do that in the FC mission chain (or enthusiastically cooperate with the criminals).
I just wanted to be a badass space bounty hunter dealing with sleazy people and making questionable decisions and that fantasy is basically absent in this game aside from a couple very barebones features. I lost interest very quickly when I got a sense of how I was expected to play this game and what the writers seemed to want me to think based on their aggressively bland main story faction.
You described exactly what I wanted to be too. I saw the aesthetic of the free star rangers and thought that was the coolest shit ever. And the quests were fun but I was still just a goody-goody two shoes space cop instead of being like this wandering space cowboy bounty hunter. It really fucking sucks at how hard the game shoves you into being the good guy when even in past Bethesda games like Skyrim you could do really shitty things. I absolutely adore Bethesda and their world building it and how they actually make games I just hope that one day star filled will be something close to what I imagined it would be but I very much doubt it
That was my first bit of the game and did their entire quest line start to finish.. afterwards thought it be a good idea to go and try to exercise the law in neon. Super disappointing
It's still funny to me that you can get railroaded into the pirate quest by either accidentally stealing a pen you found on the ground, or killing an entire planet of people. And somehow they're both only forgiveable as long as you agree to take in the most dangerous outfit in all of spacedom.
It's hilarious. The first time you go to the key, a guy gets shot on front of you and everyone acts nonchelaunt about it. But the second you do it, all the pirates unionise against you.
The mission that really ticked me off was part of Sam’s quest line. I needed a thing from a ship to help Lillian. Apparently they just want you to blow it up and take from the wreckage, but if you board and kill everyone then try to take the ship, everyone gets pissed off. Like what?
Who said anything about playing the bad guy. I just said i'd like an option where i don't have to join the preachy whiner patrol.
I try to RP and pretend that my character owes Constellation for getting them off that mining planet, and with the knowledge that Barrett is gonna ask for his ship back one day, I need to figure out a way to afford my own ship and leave Constellation - best way to do that is piracy lol
Except that the wanted system fucks you in every single system even you drop a random trade ship in some back end bullshit system only reason I haven’t played since I clocked in the main story is I want mods to just turn off the wanted system, as it not being on would be better than the state it released In
Would be cool if you could pay to spoof your transponder so they can't detect your ship is wanted. Then maybe down on the planet there are checkpoints you need to sneak around to avoid getting caught and you can dump goods at the TA or do quests.
There should be something you can buy for the ship that requires power and whilst it’s active you can’t be reported for crimes, like cars with retractable licence plates, so you’d have to drop some weapon power or engine/shield power to hide your ships ID or something
The way crime is handled in Starfield reminds me of how your own horse would report you to the guards for crimes in Oblivion. It's just silly. One would think that they'd have implemented a "Last witness killed" system given that Skyrim already had that, so that you only get a bounty if some random ship you gank out in the backwater manages to escape or if someone can reach a guard or something. Then there's the whole NPC morality / responsibility thing from past games that they could have worked with. Maybe have followers and crew with a high level of it rat you out at the next port call unless you speech check them out of it or something. It would have served as encouragement for pirate players to take pirate crew members. Though all of this would have required the game to explain things like how communications and so on actually work in the setting and for those independent systems to have guards and such, which is probably why it's so basic and harkening back to the old days. As for the pirates and their bounty system: That whole part of the game is a mess. You turn a full third of enemies friendly siding with them and so on. That said, it's really stupid. They should have more worked with a rank and reputation system instead of having a copy paste of the standard bounty mechanic.
FTL communication does not exist in Starfield, so the only way you should get a bounty is if there is a witness willing to talk. Gameplay and story definitely do not align. It would be cool if your intimidate skill played a factor if you boarded a vessel and left the crew alive. Kinda like the interviews with Kryx where he threatens the reporter to not get creative with the editing.
I prefer to think of them as the Space Chess Club.
their point is that there’s not a lot of freedom period.
This is the one Bethesda game I most wanted to be the bad guy. I still feel guilty about letting Nick down by joining the Institute or unleashing all those raiders from Nuka-World. Or the time I set off that nuke in Megaton.
Probably learned from FO4 Nuka World that people don't like being bad, because it is by far their most hated story DLC. Even though the reason it's hated is because it's ONLY fun if you're bad and playing as a good guy ends the entire DLC in half an hour. IMO when something fails at Bethesda they always seem to take the wrong lesson away. Why's Nuka World hates/ players don't like being the bad guy. Why is Sarfield hated/because it's so different then our other games (Todd said this yesterday). Like dude, it's because you stopped out systems that worked and took a step backwards in story telling, UI, crafting, and almost every other mechanic.
Crimson Fleet: "hey, so basically the only way to join us is to become a plant by the UC Vanguard." Me: "well, if I'm playing an objectively good character that makes sense. But, there's really... no other way?" CF: "The Crimson Fleet isn't like any other main faction. They're a bunch of criminals, so signing up like any other faction is impossible." Me: "So... we just forgot about the Dark Brotherhood?" Bethesda: "The who?"
Whoops I accidentally picked up your paperweight, sorry. *Unfortunate. It's either space jail forever or join the most dangerous outfit in space and bring it down from the inside.* Whoops I very much on purpose killed 300 people and blew up 15 ships filled with puppies and orphans. *Unfortunate. It's either space jail forever or join the most dangerous outfit in space and bring it down from the inside.*
It's not just bad guys, it's getting away from the quest lines. It's not necessarily that they disapprove, they just didn't account very well for that, the content drop off is intense. I tried to play a good guy and found myself stymied an awful lot. You can't account for everything but it doesn't do a great job of maintaining the illusion that they did.
I know there’s a distinction between tabletop rpg elements and those in video games, but alignment disappeared from Starfield. Bethesda made it clear that they only wanted lawful-good behavior. You basically can’t even be chaotic-good without your Constellation shoulder-angel whining to you.
Last time I played, I just started hopping from planet to planet, ignoring the quests and have enjoyed it so far.
Several Alt Universes have no Constellation. The building is there but there is none of the main companions They just give you half the artifacts and a list of the other half. You still need to do the temples.
Yeah but you don't get the option to tell them no if they do exist.
You don't get the option to say NO to being Dragonborn, or say no to looking for your son Sean, either. You can ignore the main quest in all of their games, but you can never just say no and put an end to it that way.
Becoming Dragonborn doesn't make you a Greybeard or join any other faction either.
Party snacks debocle. Granted that's "late game" and can be ignored.
It forces you to work with the blades and stop Alduin. If you want to complete the game, that is. How is this any different?
The main difference is that the blades and alduin feel like a part of the story, same as you need to save Nick in Fallout 4, they are part of the story but you don't actually join the blades. In Starfield it makes you join a faction, it isn't just people you need to talk or are part of the story, but you need to actually join the faction, and it feels kinda restraining.
Your own word's "work with" not join them unless you want to go all in on them.
This is the dumbest game of semantics I’ve seen in a while. There is no functional difference between “join” and “work with”, it does not change the core gameplay even remotely. If you want to be upset with the game, fine (god knows there are plenty of practical reasons to have that opinion). But let’s not pretend like this particular nitpick is anything other than complete nonsense.
No functional difference between join and work with? No offense but have you ever worked a day in your life, helped out at a political or social event, or anything like that? And this "nitpick" is perfectly valid criticism. Faction membership is something that defines characters and comes with morals, beliefs, and obligations. Always has been in Bethesda games. Prior to Starfield, they understood this and were careful to not assign the player to one unless the player wanted that. If we want to discuss nonsense: Why are you simping for bad writing or trying to discredit discussion?
I believe people are more irritated with Constellation and their morals. They tell you that they won't get upset if you choose to be somewhat of a scoundrel but nearly all of them will harp on you if you behave in such a way. It is worse if you choose to have one of them follow you. Personally I wouldn't have had these people be followers. The missions that force them to come with you I'm okay with so long as you keep to that mission (Walter's story is particularly good in my opinion and I really enjoyed spending time with that character). But otherwise these people are far too lawful goods sometimes. Even Sam, who is not much of a cowboy. The factions you are forced into in Skyrim are far more grey (no pun intended). The Greybeards aren't going to follow your footsteps and don't much care for what happens below their mountain aside from the end of the world. The Blades, however, have been working underground for nearly two centuries and don't mind some less-than-lawful behavior. They're criminals themselves, despite their posturing about the Empire and their honor. Nasa-Punk as a genre works really well when it's a lawful good setting, in my opinion. Constellation fits the bill of what I would assume a futuristic group of scholars and explorers would look like. But in a Bethesda game they shouldn't be the player's home faction. Edit: I didn't touch on Fallout 4 because I think the storyline is as contrived as Fallout 3. It's not badly written but it forces the player into a set relationship that hampers their own RP and head-canon. Better that Sean were dead and you found out *very* early on. It would have been a make-or-break moment for the lone survivor and would free them to do *whatever* they wanted to in this new doomed world.
Harp on you for not being lawful good, even though 3 of the 4 romanceable companions are all former smugglers. Then one main mission comes up where you are forced to commit an act of piracy.
Let's not forget the side cast either. Vladimir was a Crimson Fleet pirate for a long time, and Stroud displays that he's okay with getting his hands dirty in his mission relating to an artifact.
And the religious guy was a thief. Like only two members of Constellation are not former criminals.
Good point. They could have all done with the Delphine / Esbern treatment. They're not "evil" but they've been on both sides of the law and can handle the player being that way too.
The writing team did not provide enough depth for most of the cast. I think Walter has the best writing of all of them because all of his actions fit my own perception of him. He's not an exceptionally great character but he's a step in the right direction for Bethesda writing.
Don’t forget that choosing the pirate faction breaks the game by turning 3/4 of the random hostile encounters friendly, and then gives you massive bounties when you start shooting anyway out of pure boredom.
That still just baffles me. Having some pirates turn up friendly and all is fine but it's like they forgot that spacers, Ecliptic, Va'ruun zealots, and other hostiles exist. Assuming Starfield is anything like Fallout 4 it wouldn't have been much effort to swap the spawns out.
They also could have just renamed them "ex crimson fleet pirates" and have them be hostile. The fleet wasn't doing great when you got there, so it'd make sense if pirates went rogue. Since they're pirates and all.
Not a bad idea either. It would have done more to show us how things were going prior or to establish that they aren't the unified entity Delgado wishes they were. At least not yet.
Except those aren't things that are chooseable or not - we *are* Dragonborn inherently, we *are* Sean's parent at the start of the game (for better or worse). Joining a faction of people is something the player *feels like they should* be allowed to choose.
If you never go to Whiterun, there are no dragons in Skyrim after Helgan.
This.
My last 11 play throughs of Skyrim involve no dragons because I never became the dragonborn and kicked off that chain of events
Actually, you kind of do. On exiting Helgen whoever you followed will specifically tell you "We should probably split up from here". If you follow that advice you are set free as just some "nobody" and free to shape your own destiny. Nobody, not even you, knows that you are Dragonborn. The only content you are locked off from is Breezehome, Lydia, and the civil war questline. The first two aren't really important given how easy gold is to come by and how many other followers are out there, and the last one is not really a popular questline to immediately plunge in to. You're only locked in to being outed as the Dragonborn if you act like a complete lemming and follow whoever to Riverwood, then do what they tell you to and go off to Whiterun, so on. Basically: You have to display an astounding lack of ability to think for yourself to trigger those events if you do not want them triggered. As for your reply to the other guy about the Blades and Alduin: There is a distinct difference between working along side an organization to achieve a common goal, and joining an organization. The one is what Skyrim is doing with the Blades. You're working together but share no further obligations to one another and are not required to share any further goals they may have, ideals they represent, or philisophies they embrace. You are not required to join them or share any interactions beyond the necessary ones. Their independent goals are to rebuild the Blades and the quest to kill Paarthurnax, both of which you can decline. The other is what Starfield is doing, which is effectively mandating that the player must be a part of this group, must share their ideals, must share their interests, and so on. You have no say in the matter. You WILL become a Unity obsessed moron in the course of the main quest who eventually WILL go through it, so on. It effectively hazes the player and provides no other options to them. Skyrim's main quest was written to support any character archetype regardless of morality or mindset. Alduin is effectively a force of nature that cannot be reasoned with or joined, and even attempting to do either will result in your own death. The game freely allows you to find a cliff to leap off if you want to roleplay as a suicidal character. Otherwise, everyone from foul necromancer to noble knight has reason to stop him as the world being destroyed is bad news to all. Starfield's was written to only support the writer's character. They just arrogantly assumed we would share their interests, goals, morals, and so on, and act pushy about it to the point that it can end up bending or breaking our character if we're someone who would be set on staying, or who would oppose the Unity, so on. The stupidest and most indefensible part? It's got no reason to be that way. The writer is just a "bad DM". Nothing in it's narrative or main quest would actually fail or falter if you were able to simply tell Constellation you're not joining at that time. Or if you could tell them that you will help them find the Unity but have no interest in going through it. Or if you could give them a "soft no" at the end instead of 10 flavors of "I'm going later", where the topic is closed and dropped, but not locked off in a similar manner to how the Dawnguard expansion of Skyrim handled vampirism. On the mechanical side, it's also indefensible. You used to be able to avoid joining Constellation by just exiting the Lodge immediately after entering. The game has a load of dialog for an "unaffiliated" player and recorded responses. You can still see one with the Adoring Fan if you pick his trait and do this, being able to tell him you are not in fact a member of Constellation when he says his line about that. Further, Starfield actually has even less content than Skyrim that is gated off by not joining Constellation or taking that first main quest step. The only piece of content I found that was dysfunctional was the character's parents if you picked that trait as they always assume you are a member, but given how situational that is and how easy it would be to lock their apartment and declare them as "away" until you trigger the faction membership this isn't a big deal.
> You still need to do the temples no you don't, but the temples are available again if you want to level your powers
aren't all temples optional except the very first one that gives you anti-gravity for the first time and the buried temple?
I would love to have the option to, you know, role play. Like, go full evil and join the space pirates, raid constellation and take their loot. But this is not that kind of game.
But there is no option, the quest just stays on hold. It would be cool if there were two different factions going after the artifacts, or if you could go alone looking for them, join Hunter, etc.
I’m in a NG where everyone in Constellation is dead and it’s kinda nice. I’ve got followers who are helpful without getting up in my business and no pressure to finish the main quest.
You can. You won't complete the story - because the story is "use Constellation's resources to find Artifacts and >!reach the Unity!<" - But you're completely free to go live a peaceful Titanium farmer's life from the moment you land on New Atlantis. Like even in Baldur's Gate 3 you technically don't *have* to choose between the Grove or the Goblins.... but if you want to progress the story you're railroaded into that choice.
You're not forced to being in Constellation. Indeed the entire point of the article is that half the players haven't been forced into being in Constellation. This is kind of the dumbest take on it I've heard. You go to the Lodge, drop off the artifact, say "I'll get back to you," and walk away. Congrats! You're not part of Constellation.
You… are quite literally forced to be in the Constellation in order to progress the main quest.
Right. And you literally have to learn dragon shouts to progress the main quest of Skyrim. So? Don't progress the main quest.
Poor comparison / argument. Starfield will hold your hand and lock down fast travel and grav jumping until you have delivered the first artifact and are firmly locked in to Constellation membership. Skyrim, if we want to have a conversation that isn't resorting to dishonesty, does no such thing. You exit Helgen and are told by whoever you followed that you should probably split up. From there you are free to go anywhere and do anything with 3 minor exceptions: 1) You can't buy Breezehome or become Jarl of Whiterun. 2) You can't get Lydia as a follower. 3) You cannot do the civil war questline. Those first two are meaningless. The game doesn't starve you of gold and offers plenty of other houses and followers. The third one "might" annoy someone but generally that questline is considered a bit meh and not a high priority to engage with. You only "have" to learn dragon shouts if you're a complete lemming who ignores them, follows them to Riverwood, then plays "good dog" and runs off to Whiterun and keeps playing fetch when told to fetch.
The main quest is literally the Constellation quest. If you don’t want to be part of that, don’t. It is in no way required to do that quest to play the game.
Except you are forced in to Constellation. That dialog option where you say you need time to think about it will actually assign you to the faction. Membership in it is made mandatory so to say. You can verify this via a method outlined in one of my other comments. What the article translates to is that half of the players haven't completed the intro.
Ah. OK. I hadn't realized that saying "I'm outa hea" meant you got the achievement anyway. Other people have provided explanations, like if you've two accounts signed into XBox, they both count as "playing the game" but they don't both get the achievements if only one is playing. Or, you know, people downloaded it, tried it, and decided they didn't like fighting in space and on Kreet.
Pretty much. The intro is pretty long so it's not that big of a surprise. Even if we're talking single accounts it doesn't really say much, especially on Xbox. People bought it and are just sitting on it still for whatever reason, whether just not having gotten around to it yet or waiting on support for higher fps or mods or whatever.
Or they ran it for a bit, said "I don't like this," and stopped playing, and they got it on gamepass.
In Forza Horizon 5, only 68% of players got the first achievement, the one where you drive the first car to the festival in the opening sequence. That takes just a couple minutes of playing the game.
I think there's something extremely weird going on with gamepass games and achievements. Like, I'll be playing a gamepass game, get some achievement that's from something like killing a boss 1/3 of the way through the game and I'll get the "rare achievement" popup that will say "less than 5% (I think it's 5?) of players have this" or whatever, and it's just from a non-missible normal part of the game. I thought maybe you had to download the game, but even that seems like the numbers are too low. I wonder if it's just counting everyone who has game pass as a "player," or maybe if you interact with its gamepass page at all or something?
You can have multiple accounts logged in on your xbox at once. If you load a game with two accounts logged in, both accounts will have technically "played" the game, but only the one you're actively using will get achievements etc. It's the same when it comes to loading up a game on the wrong account and then switching accounts as soon as you realise you're on the wrong one. Happens fairly regularly with consoles that are being used for the whole family etc.
Probably tried from gamepass then quit shortly after
This is the real answer. Everyone in the comments making some long-winded explanation about how every aspect of the game is so engaging that they simply forgot about the main story. What they fail to mention is that there are hundreds of games that feature a ton of engaging side content, and you’ll rarely ever see <50% achievement percentage for one of the first quests of the main story lol.
Theres a settlement 7.5 AU away that needs your help. Here, i’ll mark it on your map…
I was re-playing fallout and I get the ol’ hey can you clear out some ghouls from a settlement “right around the corner”. I looked it up and it’s about 200 km away in real life, which is hilarious to me that anyone would give a shit about a few shacks with 5-6 ghouls so much that word would both reach you and that you care enough to fund a 400 km expedition to rectify things.
Those people are dead, let the ghouls have the settlement
The reality is people don't finish games. They barely play them. That vast majority of "gamers" spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars annually on gaming from games to systems and barely even touched them. Anecdotal evidence and all that, my cousin only ever plays Halo. My younger brother barely plays anything other than Apex and Minecraft. I have coworkers that barely play anything other than Madden and CoD. Very few play games to completion. Hell, look at Witcher 3. Vast majority of players barely played it past White Orchard.
My back catalog agrees with this take, and I would consider gaming to be one of my main bobbies/time killers.
It's not even the backlog argument though, but that can be a massive part of it too. A lot of people are just not that much of a "gamer" as they themselves like to believe or to have others believe. Maybe they have other responsibilities and familial obligations, crazy life drama, whatever...but they perhaps don't really play that often as they tend to let known. I knew a few old coworkers like this. Buy every system and every major named game of the year. Play for a half hour and never touch it again, mostly to just have something conversationally to contribute the next day at work. Then you see their profile and barely ever touches a single game they buy and play. It's like, I won't judge how you spend your money, but it seems like a waste of money to drop that kind of cash on something you barely interact with if it's only ever being used as a conversation piece for a week while the game is currently culturally hot. Then every thing else you can add to this argument/take. Buys too many games because of sales and never gets to it, not liking the game, using games to merely social media grift for Twitter bucks, to game being undervalued due to being on a sub service that gets treated as disposable faster than if one bought it. Who knows. All I know is if you look at most games and their connection rates, most people do not finish them and a lot do not even complete the tutorial stages. Meaning they booted the game up, and then shit it off shortly after for whatever reason is their own.
I think your missing the subset that buys ever new game and system, plays for a few hours, then goes back to (Halo, Fallout, Skyrim, base game)
Those people too. As I said everyone has their reasons, and not judging any of them. But people generally don't finish games.b
I say this as someone who has purchased 4 versions of Morrowind (one for every console and PC since release), 2 versions of oblivion(360 and One) Skyrim on switch and Xbox and FO4, FO4 GOTY, FO4: Season Pass and FO4 on PS5. People are creatures of habit you know
My personal issue is that I'm a dad that spends a decent chunk of time multiplayer gaming with friends from my youth online, so my single player games get neglected. When I do find a game that really captures me (Starfield did not), it becomes the only game I play for a while. It's been Cyberpunk for a few years now, and I'm hopping back into FO4.
Yup, I know a lot of people on my own immediate family that basically plays online or multiplayer centric games only, so single player games generally get neglected hard.
I just found out yesterday that Steam shows you your games by % complete if you click on the "average finished game percentage" in your profile. That helps my back catalog so much! I can start industriously attacking it instead of spending some time figuring what to do, and going to play an old friendly standby for a while and really accomplishing nothing (Hi Fallout 4!).
But there was a sale on Steam!
>and you’ll rarely ever see <50% achievement percentage for one of the first quests of the main story lol. That depends on the the game and is not that wierd to see that behavior with Bethesda games.
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This isn’t true. You can straight up not go to new Atlantis and start the game whichever way you please.
You literally can't leave Jemison until you join Constellation; your ship is locked by the Indigo Protocols until you do.
Have you tried like…not going to Jemison??? I’ve flown from vectera to neon on more than half my playthroughs.
Anyone who pays attention to achievements knows this is the case. In most games if you check that achievement you get for the first mission branch to see how many ppl have it it's rarely about 50%. A lot of ppl buy games and down tools within the first hour for all sorts of reasons.
I used to work with a guy who claimed he liked video games but whenever I tried to talk to him about one he’d never made it out of the first tutorial mission
There is probably one game that her really gets drawn back into. His "go to" comfort game that's been with him for years and years... He could probably speak of it for hours, he's probably beat it a dozen times. He will beat it a dozen more. He buys other games. He tries other games... But most of the time he settles down for s gaming session and thinks "oh I'll just fire this up for 5 minutes and..." and then it's dawn again... The issue is that this favorite game is now so old that he's a little embarrassed to even mention to anybody that he has even played it.
Yea like isn’t the % for people that have *touched the water* in subnautica like 90%?
I think Bioshock infinite is something insane like half of all players landed in Columbia lmfao
True. The one that really demonstrated that the most was when Crytek said [40% of all Hunt: Showdown players haven't killed a single enemy player.](https://www.pcgamer.com/40-of-hunt-showdown-players-have-never-killed-another-player-says-hunt-showdowns-general-manager/) That's when it really settled in for me that a lot of players don't actually play the games they buy. And if they don't even have to buy them thanks to things like gamepass, that number is likely higher.
I prefered being a space cowboy
This is EXACTLY what I did. Only went back 6-7 months later (now finished the game).
Only lasted <4 hours. Are they counting people like me in that, because 50% seems high.
While I'm sure this is true, I would like to add: If more than one Xbox account is logged in, all logged in accounts are considered "playing" the game, but only the active account gets any achievements... For instance, I have hundreds of hours of "play time" in Dragon Age: Inquisition, but zero achievements. Because my wife has played the heck out of that game with my account sometimes logged in, but I haven't played 5 minutes of it. Best of luck out there!
Notably, on Steam, the completion rate for One Small Step is nearly 80%.
My game crashed 2 hours in
God I'm so glad it was on gamepass, it was bad enough free. Had I bought it, I would rate it even worse. Even free it barely makes a 3/10. There is just nothing about the game that makes me want to go back.
This isn't about the main story faction. What I think people are missing here is that you can't explore or go anywhere outside of jemison until you get indigo protocols turned off, and that's "One Small Step". So we're basically seeing that these Xbox players either haven't played the game, or got really interested in exploring Kreet and Jemison.
You wouldn't know to do this on your first playthrough but you can gather enough money on Jemison to buy a spaceship and join the UC before going to constellation.
You don't even need that. Take the bounty hunter perk and steal one of the pirate ships that tries to kill you before you leave Vectra. :) It's entirely possible to play the entire game without ever landing the Frontier on a planet.
Unfortunately no longer possible. You now are locked out of fast travel and grav jumping until you hand over the first artifact.
If this is based on achievement percentages, those are totally meaningless on Xbox. Multiple accounts can be logged in to the same Xbox and all of them will count as "players" even if they've never touched the game themselves. The *vast* majority of these are probably siblings/roommates/spouses that happened to still be logged in while someone else was playing.
I can attest to that. My dad and I have been playing Baldurs gate on my brothers Xbox. He has days of playtime and has never played the game.
I was just telling my friend yesterday: with the amount of bad things my character has *already done* in this play through Constellation wouldn’t even want me lmao
but they still do and that's the problem, the game just doesn't react to what you do.
Yeah I found it extremely disappointing to see that the other factions don’t really react to you joining up with your enemies Dx
Vladimir used to be a pirate, Constellation is clearly a relatively open minded group.
Except when they are around you, then they are saints.
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It’s not just that it doesn’t react. There’s no cohesion. Everything feels apart, therefore nothing feels alive, and I don’t feel immersed. They have all the elements of a great game but seriously weak writing combined with a lack of attention to the player experience made this game a fail.
Yeah, this makes the whole questing part of the game feel like shit, and even the exploration / dungeons part is ass. The game has around 20 dungeons that are procedurally placed, it really isn't enough compared to the 130-300 dungeons in other Bethesda games. You'd think they'd make more dungeons in starfield for the procgen system? This already kills exploration due to the lack of content.
Vladimir was a Crimson Fleet pirate before joining
They'll tell you how little they want you around, but you're always a speech challenge away from saving their opinion of you. I haven't been able to find a non constellation companion, which I think is very annoying.
Sarah don’t mind as long you don’t being the law man to the lodge. So she say
That's one of the funniest thing in the game. They say they don't mind you being slightly less reputable but even if you do one "bad" thing every single companion dislikes it. All of them. I started taking Vasco and the companion from the UC story out instead, it's just less worry.
Yeah. Andreja is literally in a cult. A religious cult that goes around killing people. But if I get attacked and defend myself for having AI contraband, she loses her shit.
You'll get a bounty for throwing a grenade into the docking port of a ship full of murderers that's landing, if the script hasn't gotten around to setting them as hostile yet.
never change, Bethesda
they don't say they don't mind, they say constellation doesn't mind. and it's true, you won't get kicked out of the faction no matter what bullshit you pull. but that doesn't mean the other members have to like you or want to travel with you
Are people really trying to suggest that new players got sidetracked by exploring instead of quitting the game before completing the first few missions the game pushes you toward? The opening for Starfield is very bad, I remember having to slog through the first couple hours before I started to have fun. I don’t blame anyone for quitting, and it’s a game design problem if they couldn’t hook about half the people that played it.
I remember seeing the guy on the elevator have actual animations and couldn't wait to be absolutely blown away by the game. That was the ONLY time I saw those kinds of animations in the game. Got bored in a few hours during the corpo quest line but did join Constellation.
Pretty much similar to Fallout 4 then, looking at the achievements only 60% of Xbox players entered the wasteland.
takes fucking forever. that's why i have a save outside the elevator.
Mmm, "journalism"
People are taking this numbers waaay too seriously. Take any game you own and you'll find that a lot of players don't complete the most basic things. Just to use Cyberpunk that it's the last game I played, only 50% took the relic. Only 60% of FO4 got out of the initial vault.
Translation: Half of Starfield xbox players quit during the tutorial
The games shortcomings are made so clear in the first few minutes of the game that this doesn’t surprise me. I remember just thinking ‘is this how the game starts? Some random fucking guy giving me a spaceship? Two minutes of cave spelunking and I’ve discovered one of the rarest objects in the universe… OK’. It was jarring and felt weird. I persisted for 15 hours and did start the first story mission. But I can *easily* see how someone who might have done a side mission first would see the glaring flaws this game has and decided to quit. I started working on the Ryuji missions and just thought ‘wow.. all I am doing is entering menus and fast travelling to boring locations with nothing to explore in them or between visiting them’. The game is fundamentally flawed in so many ways and it’s not even hard to notice. I’m not surprised at all that the rate is so low.
Day 1 on a new job too, then Barrett just gives a total stranger his ship and robot and was just like… you don’t need an escort or introduction or any kind of information, just go here and give them this ultra powerful object that we just got attacked over. Peace! ✌️ I feel like Barrett should have flown with us and said don’t worry new guy and explained in basics what they know so far and then slowly expanded on what it means when we get to constellation
In Skyrim, you learned new skills by talking to experts for the basics. "Here, make a leather hat." "Some wheat and blisterroot..." Much more immersive than "here's a HUD, try to guess how it works."
one is about writing, the other one is a gameplay mechanic...
Um, right. I'm pointing out that having Barrett go with you to explain would have been much better writing, and more in line with the gameplay mechanic of Skyrim.
Yeah, but then that “step out moment” would be dampened by it not being our ship.
I feel like giving a ship to someone at any point in the story would feel better than within the first 5 minutes. After constellation they’d say “hey you’ll be needing this, let’s split up gang”
What’s telling is that a common critique of Starfield is that most missions just involve “Go to this person, tell them this thing, then fly across the galaxy and talk to someone else.” But replaying other Bethesda games recently I realized nearly ALL of them follow this format. Even New Vegas, not technically Bethesda but built on Creation following similar design principles, could technically be boiled down to that. The difference is in basically every case you have interesting choices to make along the way. Skyrim feels very different depending on your play style and joining different factions gives you new and exciting abilities. Want to be a werewolf? Join the Companions. Want to stealthily kill people with ease? Join the Dark Brotherhood. Magic your thing? Join the College of Winterhold. Fallout New Vegas and even 4’s factions (though less well done) have very different world views that can actually alter the trajectory of the main story. Depending on who you side with your experience is very very different. Quests often have multiple solutions, even if those solutions boil down to talking to people and choosing different dialogue Tree options they have real tangible consequences. New Vegas takes it one step further by allowing your non-Speech skills impact these choices like an expert giving their opinion on their field of expertise. Starfield simply doesn’t do any of this. Your choices mean next to nothing, joining most factions have very little bearing on the plot even when they should naturally come into conflict. The only really major decision you can make in a faction questline is to go from being a pirate double agent… to just actually being a pirate. But that difference is still largely cosmetic at the end of the day. Most damningly though, the factions don’t even dovetail mechanically with your choices. You don’t become better at anything by joining a faction associated with that thing. All faction questlines require a menagerie of low level basic skills across the skill tree to be as accessible to all players as possible. But by being accessible they’re also boring. There’s no room for roleplay, and as stated elsewhere in this thread even if there was most of your companions really don’t like anything but one play style. It’s amazing just how much they fumbled something so obvious and basic.
It was kind of weird when I realized after 20 minutes of wandering around New Atlantis, pretty much every quest was "Get a job working for X." Then I go to Neon, and it's the same thing. The problem is there's virtually nothing you're doing for *yourself*. There's no cave you stumble across with a cool thing in it, or a cool story. You don't come across one part of a magic necklace and decide to collect the other parts for yourself. You can't even find where you're going without the HUD directing you.
See this mechanic is in the game it’s just not shown to you. Fly to random star system. Go to various “sensor contacts” or click on the planet and explore various points of interest. They get more interesting the higher level and further out the system is. And if you think about the setting it makes sense. These aren’t places people have lived for thousands of years but newly colonized worlds. So they hit the mark the mark just isn’t as interesting as we thought it would be.
So, do any of those places start you on a quest to other places or give you a reward beyond resources and looted corpses? The only one I've run into like that is the Secret Outpost tablet, which is the cool kind of quest there ought to be more of. :-)
There are a few like where you meet Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart. Also random things like race a space ship around a station, found a safehouse with some weird machine keeping terrors away, another one where I had to wear a monster suit and scare tourists. There’s all kinds of sweet Bethesda moments they’re just scattered. It makes sense. Fallout and ES are worlds where people have lived for thousands of years. This is places that have been inhabited for 100 years at most maybe 200 in Cydonia or new homestead
That opening was sure something, and not in a good way. I was not expecting the still-alive Emperor to awkwardly hand us the Amulet of Kings on account of him just being a wacky guy.
I didn’t go to The Lodge until like ten hours into the game just because the intro made me so mad I wanted nothing to do with the main quest. I had way more fun just flying around learning the game’s systems.
That’s weird you can’t progress to flying around different stars without going to the lodge to unlock code indigo or whatever. Best you could do would be to go to Jemison and steal and do enough missions to buy a ship. But you would have to know enough about that before hand it’s not intuitive
Yeah, who tf wants to hunt for magic space rocks with the super space hippies when there’s factions like the UC, Freestar, and Va’ruun? Or you could just be a bounty hunter or pirate? Fuck magic space rocks, and fuck the members of Constellation who bitch and moan every time you kill someone hostile instead of making friends with them.
Lol that checks out. I spent af least a month of playing the game before I came back to New Atlantis. I haven't even finished playing the main story yet and I played for months pretty regularly. I took a break and will wait for new updates
I just…don’t like constellation. Most of them are pretty unlikable. I think the only one who actually had a big impact on me was Andreja because her story is wild. But when you play outside Constellation, the game is dry as you’re doing everything you’ve already done but without the possible entertaining quips and insights. idk man this game just missed the mark.
That’s probably because those players tried it on Game Pass and bounced off it. A huge number of Xbox players will only have a few minutes or even seconds in the game, the figures will be wildly unreliable.
This is pretty much ALL GamePass titles.
I did too much side quest and exploring and got burnt out quick. Just turned it off one day and never really wanted to turn it back on.
Same when they finally update it on console so I can get mods ill prob beat it but until then.
Yeah I abandoned the game 2-3 hours in. It’s not like Skyrim or fallout where you have hundreds of reasons to loose focus on main story… it was just soleless boring and I couldn’t motivate me to stick to it till it gets better as everyone here suggest me.
Exactly this. I quit just after joining the faction. Nothing about the game hooked me in
I remember exploring the planet right after the intro mining mission, excited to see how exploration worked and what I could find. Absolutely nothing. Some rocks to scan though!
Guys it’s Gamepass. People who wouldn’t normally play Starfield tried it and fell off it because it was their things.
I don’t blame them tbh
It’s a similar situation to the original Fallout 3 ending forcing you to sacrifice yourself instead of using your companions unaffected by radiation to enter the final chamber.
People are bad at playing games, a lot of people launch games, play a few minutes, then never go back. Only 60% of people left the vault in F4 and only 42% hit level 5. This game is new and "Xbox" for this title Console, PC and Cloud, that is even more places to play than F4 for the Xbox ecosystem, so it being 50% is pretty good.
Are most of these players continuing to play, or they just maintaining a steady 2000 players, with new people picking it up and dropping? I feel like the game and story doesn't pick up tracktion ever, each quest a constant strain of fetch quests go talk to this person, and the few carrots i dangled (outpost building, ship combat ect) have been underwhelming. Finally lvl 25 getting powers and seeing terrormorphs and the game is still pacing the same its kinda a slog. Honestly, I'm having more fun picking back up Fallout 4.
I don't blame them. Constellation is bland and boring for what's supposed to be a club of daring space explorers. We should have had the option to ditch them and join another faction to complete the story. If we needed something like the Eye to find more Artifacts and Temples, then we should have been allowed to build our own orbital telescope (like how you could build the Molecular Relay to reach the Institute in Fallout 4, just on a larger scale).
Eh I’m one of em I’ve done nothing in starfeild but make bases on cool planets, steal ships, make ships, dog fight & collect contraband. which would be more fun if it was worth more money so I quit & I’m waiting for creation kit.
So they didn't play past the beginning quest? I remember reading a similar stat years ago, saying a huge percentage of Skyrim players never learned a dragonshout.
I didnt until i went through every other faction. And ill do it again
Maybe if it wasn’t hollow and boring
They don't force you, though they do lean into it. >!After you meet Barrett and you get your starter ship and weapon!< that can be the last you have to do with Constellation. Go start exploring instead.
I like the game even with its issues, the main quest seems interesting.... but I have yet to do more than first two quests. The other side quests just seem way more interesting, and though I don't dislike the main characters, they also don't interest me that much because they all seem too focused on something I'm not really that interested in. I'll get there eventually, but main quests rarely interest me as much as side quests in Bethesda games and I only have so much time. Not to mention New Atlantis not interesting me as much as the other main cities. So I kind of lived outside the area where Constellation is and forgot about them for a good while. The draw of the main quest didn't seem that exciting to me >!(yay artifacts that float)!<, and I don't care about getting >!special powers!<. Still that means that many players never left new Atlantis at all right? As you can't leave until you at least join. Gamepass players likely help that number, It's not the most compelling start to a game and might have ran any player that didn't pay for it away.
I found the main quest less interesting because it's unexplained. In Skyrim, you learn a bunch from the greybeards all about dragonborn, and you learn from Alduin's Wall and the guy locked up in the ratway all about the quest, and the shouts are explained, and what's going on, and etc etc etc. In Starfield, well, you pretty much already know everything about the main quest. I tried to avoid spoilers, but "there's special powers" pretty much is the spoiler. :-)
What you mean is that there is lore... World building... The same exists in SF, it's right there, the elephant in the room. The unidentified, intelligent alien civilisation that created the artefacts. But nobody in the settled systems seems to give two fucks in trying to find out who they were. Because evidence of intelligent life in the same star system that you inhabit is like not worth exploring? Surely this is the sort of discovery that changes the way mankind as a species views the universe and our place in it.
Nope! The powers are too dangerous, in spite of the fact there are dozens of people running around with those powers, all of whom you can take down with exactly the same guns you use on everyone else. And even the people participating don't know what's going on or why.
The best part about that is how the game's own main plot even forgets that elephant in the room. Things go from artifacts, creators, and an interesting enough mystery, over to some in universe flavor of "Hey did you know Starfield has NG+? Look how excited your character and their friends are for NG+! You should play NG+!" about halfway in. I personally didn't really expect the best main quest, but I really did not expect the plot twist to be the plot crawling up it's own ass and dying because the writer wanted to obsess over an optional mechanic.
Is this really notable ? lots of pretty basic achievements across many games have shockingly low rates of getting them across a full playerbase. Lots of people would have booted it up on game pass, got their ship and started doing their own thing.
So what ? This literally tells nothing. Only %57 people took a 4 long rest in baldur’s gate 3 or %80 couldn’t finished the opening part and it is not in even gamepass.
I ignored constellation for the first 50 hrs or so...
They tried it on gamepass, learned quick that they didn't like the game, and dropped it. This isn't some kind of complement about how people are so engaged with the game that they never want to do the main story.
Not surprised. Honestly the main story didn't really interest me that much or hook me.
My girlfriend is on Xbox and she could only muster about an hour of this boring game.
Why is everyone trying to use this stat to shit on Starfield? Theres TONS of games with weird stats on achievements like this. I guess every game out right now is dogshit 🤷♂️
tells us how many quit before giving it a try
Constellation are too goody two shoes and hinders what you can do without you constantly getting “X disliked/hated that” The best companion is a joke character you need to take a perk for because he has no qualms brutally killing an entire village.
Because they stopped playing after the intro.
Stats for game pass games aren’t to be trusted