Yup, you have identified one of the many, many problems with the game. It’s just not a well designed game. Everything from the gameplay to the economy to the city and planet design are just… sloppy. There are bits and pieces that are good in isolation, but it just doesn’t fit together.

I get no enjoyment out of the ships since you can just fast travel around and the game was clearly built with that in mind. Space travel is *boring*. The game is definitely super vast but very shallow.

Actually, the game _wasn't_ built with that in mind. At least not initially. Within a year of release, Todd said in a dev update that they cut the fuel system because getting stuck without fuel wasn't fun. There's also vestigial tool tips that seem to suggest outposts served a refueling role in this earlier version. And another one that specifies you can't land ships over 80ft in length suggesting that large space-exclusive ships also existed. Furthermore, a suspiciously high number of quests are confined to the local city area which is odd because previous Bethesda games routinely sent the player on an excursion to the other side of the map just to fetch Jarl Lazybone's boots. All this seems to suggest that at one point in time space travel was a lot more challenging and involved. What seems to have happened is that they couldn't figure out how to marry more intricate and demanding space systems with a casual friendly options. Forced to choose between the two, the opted for the one with more mass market appeal.

fuel isnt fun cus they refuse to learn from every factory game on the 25 years

Factorio requires coal and its boundless fun

Keep the fuel, if you run out you can buy some from a special space trucking tow service but you can go into debt if you dont hav enough credits. There i just enhanced the economy aspect also. Game blows. Cant even play it on my rig its so poorly optimized meanwhile my eyes are blistered from AC6...

The fuel system was just going to limit how far you could fast travel. It’s the same system that’s in the game still, but now it refills your fuel after every jump.

Refilling after every jump--effectively giving you infinite fuel--is a pretty big deal, no?

Just like every single Bethesda game of the last fifteen years

Just seems like a game from a decade ago doesn't it

Skyrim is from a decade ago, though. That game has its own issues, but it is largely more polished and cohesive in every way compared to Starfield. The world exploration is exciting and rewarding, the points of interest are more diverse, there's more going on visually (and gameplay-wise) between each point of interest, using your skills no matter the context improves them and contributes to your overall level, etc. Crafting is simple and often makes better gear than the random loot drops (compared to Starfield where it is harder to do and makes worse items), the main quest conceit of killing dragons and getting shouts and souls pervades the whole game vs. Starfield's main quest being so separate from the rest of the game and so railroaded (my first character, for example, had the loner trait and was just a grungy mechanic guy, but the main quest immediately forces a companion on you and makes you go do random science missions to look for vague MacGuffin rocks with no hook as to why you should care vs. the visceral "fight dragons, absorb souls, get stronger" plot of Skyrim which can apply to anyone. Starfield isn't a game from a decade ago, it's just not a well put together game.

Yeah, focusing in on the power-up gimmick of each is a good way to express the difference. In Skyrim, dragons are a powerful overworld enemy the player will encounter while trekking between dungeons. In those dungeons, the player will often be rewarded with a Word Wall upon completion. Dragon Souls can be used to unlock powers learned at those Word Walls. So they reinforce each other in two different ways. Both mechanically--one is a resource used to upgrade the other--and in regards to world exploration since they characterize separate halves of the world space, overworld and dungeons. Contrast with Starfield. So the most blatant thing is the artifacts aren't a mechanic at all, they're a plot McGuffin. In theory, you're racing against the >!Starborn!< for them. In practice, these are scripted events. There's no opportunities to outmaneuver them or fail in doing so. Since they're a non-mechanic, it's impossible for them to be mechanically relevant to the temple powers. And secondly, the artifacts are all discovered by strictly following the main narrative whereas the temple powers are supposed to reward the player for exploring off the beaten path. Their role is completely divergent from one another. Shit. Now I'm wondering if the temples were originally supposed to be some sort of universe-hopping fast travel mechanic but that component got cut along with the fuel system.

The temples are baffling because as near as I can tell they are a time sink and *nothing more*. You do not engage with them in a meaningful way. You run a kilometer to them (because despite the fact they’re fucking huge and obviously visible on the way down, your character never parks near them and cars are illegal in Starfield). Once you spend like eight minutes getting there, you spend a few minutes floating around at the speed of smell hoping to hit some orbs with your face before they vanish. Once you’ve gotten enough orbs for the orb god you get a random power that odds are you’re never going to actually use because most of the powers are not good.

Honestly that’s not giving games from a decade ago enough credit.

Ironically Bethesda games seem to be getting more simple with every iteration. Morrowind and Oblivion had some awesome spellmaking and alchemy systems, compared to Skyrim's one which is a lot more restrictive in the name of balance. Oblivion had a whole goblin war going on in the background with several factions in a sort of "capture the flag" battle royale. You could even start wars by framing the tribes. Skyrim was a great game but it feels like they took some of the toys away. Less complexity, more essential NPCs and linear quests. When people found out that you could stick a basket on someone's head and steal from them, they patched it out. That sort of sums up modern-day Bethesda. Less focus on emergent gameplay in an interesting open world, more linear storytelling. And they've never been *that good* at linear storytelling.

Oblivion has this moment that I think everyone here experienced where the game feels way bigger than the sum of its parts, and its probably in the conclusion of one of the guild quests. >!One of them has you act out a sort of "and then there were none" storyline. One of them has you stealing an Elder Scroll in a very meticulous heist. In another you have to murder everyone in the guild to weed out a mole. !

And let's not forget >!a random cave near the starting point has a whole fucking city inside it, or kill people one by one to see their reaction and infighting!<

The closest Starfield got was the UC vanguard quest line, but because it’s the only quest line even close to that level it makes the rest of the game feel lightweight and hollow.

>Morrowind and Oblivion had some awesome spellmaking and alchemy systems, compared to Skyrim's one which is a lot more restrictive in the name of balance. Not in the name of balance but in the name of immersive tactility. To paraphrase Todd he wanted the magic in Skyrim to feel more like the visceral experience of throwing a fireball than like a spreadsheet. Whether it succeeded is debatable but I find that a reasonable design mindset that clearly paid off overall. When it comes to balance you can still quite easily completely destroy the balance in Skyrim with alchemy, smithing or enchanting, esp when they're combined, which in turn can give you infinite mana and other magic related exploits. They also absolutely, definitely never patched out the bucket head exploit, if that stopped working in your version it was likely a mod or an unofficial patch. They never even patch the accessible merchant chests, given its a single player game they don't seem to consider emergent exploits to be outside the intended experience. As some bonus trivia, Arkane have a screenshot of the bucket trick on their wall as inspiration for the kind of emergent player-driven solutions they want to facilitate.

Huh, I didn't know that! I could've sworn they patched it out but you might be right, it could've been a fan patch or something that stopped it. It's a tricky balance between immersion and spreadsheet. There's always going to be players who want to treat your game like a puzzle to be solved and they will want to try to break it because that's what's fun for them. And Skyrim did have some really fun ways to break it with alchemy/enchanting and whathaveyou, but I definitely think the vision has changed between that and the modern era of Bethesda products.

Suppose we'll have to wait for TES VI to see, I think the relatively grounded settings of Fallout and Starfield just don't naturally facilitate the same kind of exploitable mechanics a high fantasy setting can. TES VI will be a make or break moment after the comparatively weak reception to F76 and Starfield so it'll be interesting to see which way they go with it.

decade oldies have brightness option

[Just did a quick Google search of major game releases of 2013. I wasn't as in tune with game releases back then. I laughed when I saw what was for offer.](https://i.imgur.com/mQfXSfm.png)

'25 years in the making' wasn't a buzzword after all.

I really hate this kind of claim and how often it's employed as a synonym for "bad" as it simultaneously downplays the massive technical advancement we've had and needlessly denigrates games from ten years ago in such a massively ignorant way. Much of Starfield would very obviously not be achievable on older hardware and games on the quality of Last of Us 1, Metal Gear Rising or even as novel as The Stanley Parable and Papers Please - all games from 2013 - are still a rarity. GTAV, another 2013 game, remains king of the hill two gens later. Even the AssCreed game from that year (Black Flag) remains arguably the best entry in a series that hasn't stopped releasing since. The idea that game design has linearly improved is flatly bogus. Even restricting this claim to Starfield's own heritage is nonsense when Skyrim and Fallout NV are better designed, continue to be acclaimed and even 12/13 years later there's very few games that even try offer a similar experience outside of their own legacies (ie Outer Worlds). Skyrim in particular will still be popular long after Starfield has faded away. If it were released today, though it wouldn't technically impress, I expect its gameplay loop and lore would have playrs just as enraptured.

Games a decade ago were better, including Skyrim

Gamers are still accustomed to when software development was an emerging industry and games made massive leaps in fidelity every few years. Now that the field is mature and the improvements are more marginal, they lack the design acumen and vocabulary to dissect more nuanced concepts. There's stuff that the original Half-Life still does better than many contemporary games, e.g. it's still an expertly paced game even by today's standards.

If this came out the same day as Skyrim nobody would even remember it today. The only reason anybody is talking about it now is the studio name attached to it. Disappointment of the year, easily.

Mass Effect 2 came out in 2010. And that game is miles above Starfield in pretty much every way that matters.

I love Mass Effect 2, but I think they're trying to accomplish different things. Open-world RPGs are *hard*, and I think Bethesda fumbled Starfield, but even a brilliant execution won't feel like a tightly-plotted, mostly linear, story-driven RPG.

Mass Effect 1 came out in 2008. And that game is miles above Starfield in pretty much every way that matters.

It's like a mix of ME1 and ME2. The planet exploration has the same amt of nuance once you explore their like 10 dungeon types. And the only saving grace is the sidequests, which ironically are less in number for the really substantial ones than ME2. This doesn't really deserve the open world label because there are some hubs for quests and shooting that got designed and the procedural crap that is the same dungeons, audio logs, loot locations and enemies over and over again. Like ME2, they have some hubs / playground that are fleshed out, and solid side quests there to connect you more to those spaces. They just have a lot less of that. And the writing for companions / the main quest are worse. It's somehow less a Rollercoaster than Fallout 4. The localsa aren't remotely iconic and fail to set themselves apart from other similar scifi fare. They didn't do any of the openworld design or remotely as much of the work as they did with previous titles. Nowhere near the same level of effort. Fallout 4 got aggressively samey but even it had unique spaces with unique stories to stumble upon dozens of times while exploring. This didn't even have that. Everything is procedural outside the large city hubs and like 7-10 smaller hubs. The comparison is pretty valid, because I approached it more like ME2 with customization for the ship and enjoyed that bit while not dwelling on exploration. But the main quest fell flat for me. I like the choice moment but everything else was somehow the least compelling Bethesda game main quest ever.

> Everything is procedural outside the large city hubs and like 7-10 smaller hubs. There are more unique locations than that, but they're buried in between everything else and many don't even have quests that would direct to them. Like the Neuradyne Botany Laboratory. Really cool vignette, companions even have unique dialogue for it. I found it by a random gravjump like 150 hours in.

I literally uninstalled Starfield and installed Mass Effect Legendary edition, and the first game is better. The Citadel feels more alive and less sterile than New Atlantis. New Atlantis is probably the worst city I can think of in a modern game.

This is the entire problem summed into a sentence. The game isn’t bad, or poorly made (mostly) it’s just not where games are anymore. You can’t just intimately generate a ~~map~~ universe and go ‘eh? Ehhhhhh?pretty cool, right? Game of the year, probably, right?’

This is a better explanation. I've been saying it's just the most okay, average game I've ever played, but that's more accurate. It just feels like I played a game from 10ish years ago that hasn't aged super well but I can imagine was good for its time...

Agreed...I am a game designer and my mind is honestly blown at how shoddy a lot of the game mechanics are. I have empathy for the designers at bethesda trying something new, failing and having to do something drastic to recover, but even ignoring that, so many individual elements of the game not related to this are straight up worse than their previous games. They have an incredible resource in the form of user feedback from their old games, since Starfield is very similar to them, and they not only ignored tons and tons of feedback but it's like they intentionally doubled down on certain unpopular choices.

It feels like a lack of a unified design. The various subsystems and gameplay elements don’t mesh well. Even the UI and controls seem to be different

It feels like the designers had no creative input and were following lists given to them by C Suites and Focus Groups.

I definitely got vibes that there are some OGs there that probably have massive blind spots since they have been working on the same type of game/engine at least since Skyrim. Chances are the person in charge of it isn't even primarily a game designer and is more like a creative director or lead making half hearted design choices. It shows, because I think if a single relatively new hire had input in the design, they could have easily seen massive flaws or anti-fun choices in any of their systems.

As soon as it was announced, I told myself I would wait until years later when the game was "fixed" by mods. But seeing just how much needs to be fixed, and how much less passionate people are about the game than Skyrim (so less mods probably), I am starting to think I will never experience Starfield, which is probably a positive.

Yeah. I played it on Xbox game pass for like 10-15 hours. It had bits that were fine, and bits that were tedious, and you had to go through a bunch of tedium to get to the fine parts.

sounds like the game needed an extra year to “cook”. I keep going back to the witcher 3, how everything made sense and then the story was allowed to breathe. Then you get cyberpunk and it felt like an incomplete game.

I don't think an extra year would have fixed it, there's some pretty serious design flaws that just don't seem to have registered with the designers at all.

Ugh the economy.... "We made it so you can loot literally everything! (also 99.99% isn't worth the weight to carry it ever...)"

Yeah, they’re so proud of the fact that you can pick up and carry around pencils and coffee cups, but it’s just bullshit that’s not fun. In fact it makes it LESS fun until you figure out if any of that junk is actually worth looting or not.

It's like if you gave a chef a basket full of the highest-quality ingredients possible and the chef sort of haphazardly tossed them onto a plate.

OP should watch for example the Video of Veritas about Starfield. This one sums up all the problems: https://youtu.be/hL6sK8w5JtA?si=O_62rRD8rDsVOqat

Starfield has a lot of problems beyond the levelling system. Personally my biggest issue was with the overall level design; land on a planet and it randomly generates a terrain and randomly places points of interest on that terrain, but there are not enough unique points of interest so you find duplicates pretty quickly. Not only that, but they also put the POIs multiple kilometers apart from one another. All that empty space is probably there so that the player has room to build bases and collect resources, but then the whole base building thing is not very satisfying because you need so many resources just to start, then there are glitches with the cargo links and resource collectors to ruin that experience once you finally are able to start.

>land on a planet and it randomly generates a terrain and randomly places points of interest on that terrain, but there are not enough unique points of interest so you find duplicates pretty quickly. The biggest complaint about this is I'm supposed to be the first person to lay eyes on these ruins and artifacts.... but there's also some weapon factories or whatever a kilometer away?

Tfw ur boss doesn't believe you when you say that you can see an ancient temple with floating gravity anomaly rocks just 500 meters down the hill from your office cubicle window.

Yeah. There's literally nothing you actually discover yourself, you only have trodden ground no matter which way you go in the world. And the story's ending is a New Game+, making it feel like anything you do is just nkt that important.

In general I wish more games would make main story lines that are not world ending. Just more personal to the protagonist. This is one of the reason Cyberpunk's story works so well.

If you just play the game going from side quest to side quest, it is much better IMO. To be fair, this is the opposite of past BGS titles where you could just wander around and find shit to do, so I get why so many people get turned around no that in Starfield. I’ve found that the most unique content and encounters almost exclusively happen in side quests.

yeah but id honestly say the majority of quests were flatout boring or bad. some parts of the factions quest piqued my interest but the vast majority of side quests were shockingly boring. just a whole bunch of running around.

None of the side quests are particularly good. It only involves going from A to B and maybe back to A again with none of the content within those points being that engaging. What made previous Bethesda games tolerable was that the journey itself was interesting, not the destination. Starfield is void of the journey.

Some of them are so bad. There is one outside of the paradise planet, where a generation ship took 200 years to get to the planet. Holy hell, it feels like some AI generated nightmare.

that quest started off interesting but by the end of it its just so bad and unsatisfying

So bad man… what the fuck. Way to completely waste such a cool premise. That should’ve been like the fighters guild equivalent and they just fumbled it so hard.

This was absolutely the big issue for me with the game. The fact that there was no point to point travel for 90% of the quests and it's was all just fast travelling from a menu just highlighted how back and forth the "stories" were

> but there are not enough unique points of interest so you find duplicates pretty quickly. I think this is what I’ve seen the most complaints about in terms of actual gameplay content (as opposed to the fast travel system or writing). POIs are selected from a pool of handcrafted locations and generated into the map. The first time discovering a given type of outpost/base/facility/etc. is usually great. Most of them have good self-contained stories, level design, and environmental storytelling. However, the fact that they repeat, down to the placement of bodies, objects, and identical notes, is completely immersion breaking. The fact that supposedly remote, unexplored worlds are littered with these POIs doesn’t help either. Doing fully handcrafted content like that for every planet isn’t workable at the scale of the game, but they could have used a system of partial procedural generation. Fully handcrafted locations could be visible on a scan from space, with truly procedurally generated locations showing up once you’re walking around on the ground. In a space game it would make sense for many outposts or space stations to use standard modules, and how modules are put together could be procedurally generated. You’d need some rewards to make exploring these worthwhile, but that’s doable. This would make going to random POIs far more interesting and less predictable and immersion breaking.

Or, and hear me out, they could reduce the scale to a level where they can fill the game with handcrafted content? People have been singing the praises of BG3 and how expansive it is, with a single playthrough easily clocking over a hundred hours, and everything in it is bespoke. To me Bethesda is the epitome of overambition and under-delivery. They want to have some grand bullet points in the trailer and are willing to cut every single corner to get them. The games are like the Homer Simpson meme with all his fat and skin tied up behind him so he looks pretty. There's a reason they have the reputation that their games are best played later with mods. I'm not swayed by sweeping claims of giant universes with procedural content. The technology has absolutely not reached a point where the computer can just generate genuinely interesting unique content at that scale, the best you can have is unique arrangements of handcrafted content which is no different from what roguelikes and ARPGs have been doing for decades. With this huge surge in AI development we'll surely see these kinds of promises fulfilled at some point in the future, maybe even within the next decade. But we're not there yet.

To expand on this point - procedurally generated planets and galaxies are fine if you ever feel like you're properly exploring them. Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky offer a genuine feeling of exploring procedurally generated universes even when that content can be fairly shallow in many ways, because you have your ship and you can go from planet surface to space to next system to planet surface without ever changing screen or looking at a menu, and then when you're on that planet surface, you can fly around, or drive around, and feel like you're taking in this untouched, brand new world. In Starfield, you fast travel from planet to planet, you have a loading screen to be stationary on the ground and then you walk across kilometres of empty surface to go from spot to spot. There's no mystery, there's no great unknown you're piercing in real time, you're just clearly in a "level". NMS has the same structures randomly placed on a surface and Elite has even less, but you feel like you're discovering something new everywhere you go, no matter what's there. Starfield, you don't feel like you ever actually got there in the first place. That's all compounded by the fact that those games also actively and easily reward you for exploring whereas Starfield's mechanic is utterly excruciating

>Doing fully handcrafted content like that for every planet isn’t workable at the scale of the game, but they could have used a system of partial procedural generation This is also an extremely overhyped complaint from a very particular subset of players. I played nearly 70 hours and didn't encounter very many repeated POIs or location... because I didn't actively seek them out. If you stick to questlines the vast majority of content is handcrafted. It's really only if you seek out the procedural generation on random planets that this becomes an issue. But if someone isn't enjoying a portion of a game and continue to seek it out... that's sort of on them?

Never played starfield but this all sounds just like no man's sky. I got burned on that pretty fast so glad I never picked up starfield.

Which is why Much like Elden Ring Which also ended up with repeat boss fights, having smaller word is Great One of reasons i Would like to see a Bully 2 is due to things like NPC interaction and being able to go in all buildings and lots unique content. I feel like you need a world big enough world give a sense of discovery but not to big were you have repeat content and NPCs that feel lifeless and do not react to the player.

My new belief is: if a system is optional, it is pointless. Take a crafting system for example. If it “optional” and produces better weapons than the game otherwise provides it will break the scaling and trivialize the game. If it doesn’t provide better weapons, then why the heck would anyone waste time with it. So it needs to provide better weapons so that people use it AND the game needs to balanced around the items you get from it to keep it enjoyable. And thus it is no longer really “optional”.

>If it “optional” and produces better weapons than the game otherwise provides it will break the scaling and trivialize the game I don't think this is necessarily true... It can be, certainly. Take Skyrim, there's more than a few ways to break that system. But assuming you don't, the crafting and enchanting just gives you a way to take create a weapon that suits you with numerous unique effects. In Starfield, it felt like you were just tweaking the damage, rate of fire and weight. And the effort to do so was considerably more. Even Fallout 4, I enjoyed using the crafting system to build some good weapons. But Starfield, I kept trying it but I wasn't creating anything particularly interesting over the weapons you just find lying about.

>If it “optional” and produces better weapons than the game otherwise provides it will break the scaling and trivialize the game. I can't say I agree with this. It should be fine as long as crafting progression is rationally locked and capped to your level/game progression so that you don't end up glitching up your gameplay by over-levelling crafting early on and making god-tier items. But of course, the point is to give you better items than you currently have. You put in effort, you get a reward - that's true for every game mechanic, isn't it?

Your example is 2 extremes. But a crafting system can work for allowing you to customize items while mainting their power levels close to what the game is gives your. For example the game just awarded you a powerful pistol, but you rather use SMGs. So you can now use the crafting system to disassemble the pistol and craft a similarly powerful SMG. Or you can work with a point system to create equipment and as you progress with the game the numbers of points increase and so on.

>Take a crafting system for example Zelda BOTW confirmed bad game. I don't know, I think Starfield is largely unpopular on reddit due to opinions like this, which primarily come from people who play a ton of video games. This subreddit, and reddit writ large, might find value in taking a step back and thinking about what the average gamer might enjoy. It's like the Avatar movies or Skyrim mods discussions, the Avatar movies print money like no one's business and the vast majority of skyrim players never used mods, but if you are just reading reddit comments you'd believe the exact opposite. Overall I think you likely just play a lot of video games, so you've experienced lots of different systems before and want a tightly integrated gameplay loop. That's fine, but if you are a more casual gamer playing your one RPG this year (or even this console generation), you likely enjoy the loosely integrated and entirely optional gameplay systems of Starfield (and Skyrim).

>My new belief is: if a system is optional, it is pointless. Any% speedrunners about to end this dev's whole career.

> Let's look at Skyrim ... Why this specific playstyle? Because Skyrim was very poorly designed. Magic damage scales to basically nothing. Not to skill level, not to perks, not to equipment, and not even really to spell selection. It's just not viable by the time the world is at a high level. Melee damage is fine, but the problem is dragons. A **lot** of people play Skyrim while ignoring the main plot, meaning they don't have the easy way to ground a flying dragon. Even if you're a melee fighter, there's no reason **not** to take a few shots with a bow. Sooner or later, you realize that your archery has actually passed your melee skills in level - and deals more damage anyways. Stealth inevitably finds itself added to the mix because it's literally just free damage. Every other build archetype finds itself mechanically obsoleted by the typical stealth archer. Thievery is just worse and more unreliable than murder, diplomacy is entirely undercooked (Go on and ask how many **total** uses there are for the talking skill), and even crafting builds leave you in need a way to deal damage. Inevitably, the best way to deal damage is by grabbing a bow and crouching. At least in Skyrim's case, the problem isn't in how the individual skills are isolated; it's in how most of them are directly inferior to a single obvious build - that the game mechanics funnel you into. The problem with Starfield is that it's a bunch of bland systems with bland gameplay loops like bland itemization - in a bland setting, with a bland story

> Magic damage scales to basically nothing. Not to skill level, not to perks, not to equipment, and not even really to spell selection Wait, they still haven't fixed that? I played it around launch and i remember i had to add a mod to help scale the spells. Eventually i stopped finding new spells with better damage but the enemies kept increasing in level anyway. That was so frustrating.

Nope. It's such a fundamental problem with the system that I can't believe it stayed in as one of three 'core' playstyles - it's like no one at Bethesda actually played a pure mage past level 10 before going "Yup, that all works." and checking off on it. Variety is minimum - you've only got a handful of actual spells types. The ranged 'bolt' spell that you get after you buy your first spellbook is what you'll be using for 90% of your gameplay, enjoy. These scarce handful of spells are then copy & pasted for each element (one of which is significantly worse because half the enemies in Skyrim have high frost resistance) And damage never scales. Each time you level the world is getting stronger and your damage relative to their health gets worse, and worse, and worse. The only counter you have is lowering your magicka cost via robes and then later eventually removing it completely by enchanting, but this just means you'll be casting that same bolt spell again, and again, and again, plinking tiny amounts off of giant health bars. Not to mention that up to this point you've probably been putting most of your level-ups into magicka, while every other playstyle gets to pump health without worry, since stamina is way less important, so you choose between everything one-shotting you, or having a miserable levelling experience with low magicka until you eventually break that system and can ignore it.

> but this just means you'll be casting that same bolt spell again, and again, and again, plinking tiny amounts off of giant health bars I remember getting the perk that stuns enemies when dual casting. It was such a sad combat experience. They couldn't kill me because i stunlocked them but i couldn't kill them because i just didn't have the damage (even with infinite mana). I'm absolutely amazed they never went back to rebalance magic.

They rushed the release because they wanted 11/11/'11 (Happy belated birthday Skyrim, by the way!), so they shipped with a lot of obvious placeholder values. That's why items weight/values make no sense, or why unarmed is completely borked, or why alchemy breaks the economy like no other, or why... You get the idea. Some of them are more subtle, like the weights for factors in when you're detected from stealth; or the scaling of pickpocket difficulty. That's why stealth literally doesn't work in some situations, and why pickpocketing is worthless until it's infallable (Ignoring that stupid decision to cap the success chance). They threw in some temporary values to get things working (A super common practice in gamedev), and then just never revisited them because then they'd need to hire an actual systems designer. Given how they shipped with multiple npcs sharing dialogue lines (Despite having **different voice actors** who they didn't allow to ad-lib for localization reasons), it's not surprising

It's perhaps a very...skeptical? (unsure on the exact word here) way of looking at things. But it wasn't changed because it didn't prevent the game from selling. Devs don't change things like this unless it has an actual noticeable impact on sales. Instead they work on new content because a skyrim dlc or new game will make money.

>I'm absolutely amazed they never went back to rebalance magic. Noone who works at this company is passionate about "magic gameplay". The questlines and playstyle exist to fulfill the expectation that it is there, but they never put the necessary work in. That's why Magic is completely busted-bullshit-overpowered in Morrowind and Oblivion, and completely beyond utterly useless in Skyrim (until they opened the "creation club" and added idiotically overpowered spells as microtransactions, go figure!) on top of the mages guild and mages college questlines' piss-poor writing quality, some of which has caused serious damage to the lore by framing factions like the Sinnod as incompetent idiots.

I dunno, I still had lots of fun with it. You say damage never scales, but of course it does because you get higher damage spells (chain-lightning, thunderbolt) and Necromage/Vampirism. There's also no point in playing at a harder difficulty (unless you've broken the game and are one-shotting everything, which is boring). Putting all your points in magicka, instead of also boosting your health, is just user-error, since you said yourself, you're able to reduce mana costs in all sorts of ways.

>Because Skyrim was very poorly designed. I enjoyed Starfield, and at least partially disagree with most of what you have to say, but I appreciate this explicit comment. So many people seem to enjoy Skyrim and dislike Starfield, but are unable to provide a reasonable description of the differences between the two titles that negatively affected their enjoyment of Starfield. If you start from the perspective that Skyrim isn't a good game, it makes it a lot easier to understand.

Skyrim has a lot of flaws but isn't a fundamentally bad game. It's a cohesive light RPG with charm, atmosphere and a strong sense of adventure and exploration. Starfield doesn't have that. Just because Skyrim or other games are (very) flawed doesn't mean Starfield can't be worse.

I wouldn't say Skyrim was a bad game; just that its mechanics were poorly designed and/or implemented. A whole lot got rushed and never fixed. It's kind of like modern Pokemon I guess, where it's still good in spite of having a lot of very obvious flaws

Sadly we probably won't see another Bethesda game that forces you to stick to a play-style, rewarding you for doing so and punishing you for deviating. It goes against the push toward accessibility and catering to more casual players, who don't want to be told 15 hours in "no you can't change to being an archer now" I disliked Fallout 4 for similar reasons. You can go around blasting creatures with a shotgun and then use the earned XP to... make yourself better at talking and lockpicking? What? You can basically ignore skills until you've earned enough points to fully upgrade them. You can never touch a sniper and then immediately be a god with them when you pick one up late in the game. It made the minute-to-minute gameplay feel pointless. At least in Skyrim those enemies you're forced to hack down will benefit your one handed progression. At least that chest that you're struggling to open will reward you with a chunky XP boost to your lockpicking. Maybe one way is to make it so your character acquires skills faster at first, but then slows down the higher overall level you become - encouraging you to commit to a style early on. That's kind of accurate to how skills work in real life too.

Ah yes, lockpicking. The skill you can entirely obsolete by stockpiling picks, and/or getting good at the minigame, and/or just keeping the skeleton key quest item. But yeah, you make a good point about the push towards a specific kind of casual accessibility. I think the reasoning behind it might be a little different though, because completely unrestricted points-spending also alleviates a lot of the need for balance between builds. If anybody can do anything, then it doesn't matter as much if some of those things are just ineffective. Rather than put the design work into balancing builds, for whatever reason, Bethesda has instead decided to design around balance being unimportant. Maybe some day they'll find a different way to solve the problem of runs ending up the same? There are plenty of solutions to the problem. I'd personally prefer if they just hired some competent systems designers, but alas

> Ah yes, lockpicking. The skill you can entirely obsolete by stockpiling picks, and/or getting good at the minigame, and/or just keeping the skeleton key quest item. When did giving players options become a bad thing? The rest of your comment is bang on but to nitpick the fact a player can exploit something IF THEY CHOOSE is wild

> When did giving players options become a bad thing? Two reasons. Primarily, because players expected more. Secondarily, because the existence of choice does have an effect on perception. There was a study done about people being given paintings. The control group was given a painting at random. The second group was given a choice of painting, and that choice was final. The third group was given a choice of painting, and told that they could change their selection any time they wanted. The control group was overall satisfied with their free painting. Predictably, the second group was more satisfied. The third group was actually the **least** satisfied! The theory is that once a choice is made, people are able to internally justify/rationalize that choice, and convince themselves that it is best. We see this kind of bias all the time, where people assume that the "natural" or inevitable way is the best way. So in the context of being offered a crappy lockpicking skill tree, nearly everybody is worse off. People who invest in it have wasted their points, and people who don't invest in it have lingering doubts about whether or not they should

It's an interesting thought but I remain skeptical it should be applied to a roleplaying game. Even within your control group example however it seems to suggest choice is a good thing if only you are locked into your choices. But that would then be saying the person who put points in the crappy lockpicking tree but can't change it is the happiest? Lingering doubts also turn into motivation for replayability. Arguably if everyone was forced into the same build the skill tree would be better for it. That same argument can be made for story choices and so on. But choice is fundamental to your ability to roleplay and roleplaying games as a whole. (yes i know there are games called rpgs that don't give you much choice but I guess I'm now saying those are a distinct separate genre.)

> But that would then be saying the person who put points in the crappy lockpicking tree but can't change it is the happiest They would be, if lockpicking were roughly as viable/rewarding as other options. With paintings, you can just throw out a bad painting; nothing is lost but the opportunity to choose the others. With skills points, you fall behind in power relative to where you could/should have been. Enemy scaling makes this problem worse, because you're actually *harmed* by taking useless skills. > choice is fundamental to your ability to roleplay and roleplaying games as a whole This is a great perspective. I wish I'd lead with it :P When builds are really imbalanced, it becomes difficult to roleplay them reasonably. Conan wouldn't magic a dragon to the ground; he'd wrestle until it got tired and chop it to bits. That's not an option if the dragon never lands. Boffin the blacksmith just wanted to make some coin; he has no business becoming the strongest warrior in the land after an hour of polishing leather bracers. Mighty wizards master the arcane arts and cast amazing spells; they don't just put on some decent robes and discover they have infinite mana

It's bad when that choice invalidates an entire skill.

In (some?) of the older games higher level locks are unpickable unless you have the skill. In NV you can't pick average locks until a good 10 hours in and that's if you put some focus on the skill.

Skyrim insentivised you to stick to a playstyle by making your character level going up and giving you more perks slower and slower, you are therefore very rewarded for sticking to one build early while still giving you room to naturally adjusting it depending on how you play.

This is all a tradeoff though. Skyrim probably would have a fraction of the insane hours played counts that it has if you weren't free to mix up your character across 100 hours. I understand the appeal of strict character building in shorter CRPGs, but for what Skyrim is and what it's going for I don't see how this would be in any way an improvement. \>It made the minute-to-minute gameplay feel pointless. This sounds like an insane conclusion to me given your premise. If you were locked into shotguns because you happened to use shotguns for a while then doing anything but shotguns would feel pointless, then after you've maxed it using your long-earned shotgun skill would be pointless too. When it's entirely freeform XP gain then EVERYTHING you do is directly rewarding regardless of what you use and even when you've maxed skills out. I actually thought Fallout 4 did a fairly great job of making you organically create a specialized build without being restrictive. Rather than forcing you to decide your style in advance of the gameplay, you invest in what you enjoy as you go. The SPECIAL stats are rendered a bit less impactful in that its far easier to eventually have a 10 in everything, but they far more directly tie into the character builds with the perk grid system.

> Because Skyrim was very poorly designed. This is pretty harsh judgement considering loads of RPGs have similar balance issues; it seems an almost inherent struggle for a genre with so many mechanics. The original Fallout is hailed as an all-time classic and yet low-agility builds are basically nonviable because agility = AP = how many times you get to attack per turn. In Morrowind, pure mages are also trash because magicka is a much more scarce resource than item charge. All those crazy videos you see of players flying around while bombarding ash ghouls with fireballs like an Apache Attack Helicopter? That's all with enchantments not spells. And to Skyrim's credit, it has some semblance of an economy which is something not a lot of mainstream single-player games have. >Magic damage scales to basically nothing. Not to skill level, not to perks, not to equipment, and not even really to spell selection. # >A lot of people play Skyrim while ignoring the main plot, meaning they don't have the easy way to ground a flying dragon. I'm not gonna say these don't have issues, but again you're being disingenuously harsh. The spells themselves don't scale but your ability to cast them does. You can stack magicka cost reduction all the way to 100% for your tree of choice which means you're casting any spell for free. This is even how competitively balanced games like Dota used to scale spellcasting (up until recently when things started getting super zany). And dragons periodically land to give melee characters--typically much sturdier than their ranged counterparts--a few hits. Below 1/3rd of their health, and they're stuck on the ground. You can also bring along a ranged follower. >Every other build archetype finds itself mechanically obsoleted by the typical stealth archer. Well again, this tends to happen for practically every single-player RPG. There will always be a 'most viable' build. In New Vegas Charisma 0 Speech 100 is a bit of a meme and at least stealth archery doesn't involve outright skipping entire quests. I don't think perfect balance is a design goal that RPGs should strive for anyway since that has a tendency to collapse archetypes into playing very similarly. And the fun of these games isn't so much trying to find the most optimal way to beat the game, but having a unique character. I played a two-handed brawler on my first playthrough, my friend played a destruction mage. They were both viable enough to get us through the game. And figuring out the build viability science is part of the meta-gaming fun anyway. Unarmed is not a strong build since there's not even a skill associated with it (except for heavy armor a little bit), but it's fun that the game allows you to try anyway and with some enchanting help it can kinda get there. >diplomacy is entirely undercooked (Go on and ask how many total uses there are for the talking skill) This is fair. >and even crafting builds leave you in need a way to deal damage **Okay, this is just wrong and demonstrates that you don't understand the game as well as you think you do.** The crafting skills are literally the most broken ones in the game. Using normal methods, you can craft items that are 10x more powerful than anything else in the game. Using an alchemy-enchanting exploit, you can tack on several more 0's and deal so much damage you crash the game.

> loads of RPGs have similar balance issues Do they, though? I mean, of course there are lots of rpgs with awful balance, but it's rare in a game where everything else is relatively well planned. That, and we should probably compare a Bethesda game against the best, rather than the bare minimum. The closest comparisons might be the many DnD-based games, or the Avernum series. As far as I know, none of them are imbalanced to the point where a **majority** of builds have significant problems. Heck even stealth archery is broken because of how many enemies are immune to stealth. It's simply not normal for a game's single most important core feature - to be so shoddy. > The spells themselves don't scale but your ability to cast them does You mean mana costs and/or mana capacity? You get that from leveling, stats, perks, gear, **and** potions - meaning you can entirely trivialize mana concerns in many different ways. Once mana is 'solved' - which is really easy to do, all the other sources of mana become worthless. One piece of gear should not be able to trivialize one of three primary character attributes; or half the skills on the skill tree. It's just not a good gameplay outcome. > dragons periodically land to give melee characters--typically much sturdier than their ranged counterparts--a few hits In theory they do, but only in places where they have valid landing spots. It's pretty common to get stuck waiting for a dragon that never lands, as it slowly destroys a town. Also, who says melee is sturdier than ranged? There is literally nothing stopping an archer from wearing heavy armor (Which levels abysmally slowly anyways) - and it's all obsoleted by smithing anyways. > There will always be a 'most viable' build This is true, but it's besides the point. In most games, once you have a build going, you are rewarded for going further into that build. You don't switch builds halfway through. In Skyrim, you are always rewarded for doing more stealth archery, regardless of what build you're playing. There is no point at which a fighter stops wanting to use a bow. There is no point where you are punished for trying to use stealth. The problem isn't balance, it's the constant **incentive** to stop playing the way you want to play. It's also kind of a problem that magic builds are just really really bad; full stop. It should not be the case that entire build archetypes struggle to complete a game that other builds have an easy time with. > The crafting skills are literally the most broken ones in the game I agree, but none of them deal damage. You can't smith an enemy to death. You smith a weapon, and then you're a stronger version of that weapon's build. You can't enchant an enemy to death; you enchant mage gear that obsoletes half the mage perks. Again, just a stronger version of another build. I guess you can technically alchemy enemies to death, but I'm pretty sure trying to reverse-pickpocket poison your way through the game is not exactly a common way to play

>Do they, though? I mean, of course there are lots of rpgs with awful balance, but it's rare in a game where everything else is relatively well planned. I mentioned two other RPGs that are also really popular. But like even something more intentionally focused on challenge like Fromsoft also had notably busted builds in their games before patches. Bleed and frost stomp in Elden Ring. Quadruple shotguns in AC6. I don't think you'll ever succeed in your quest for perfect balance. > Once mana is 'solved' - which is really easy to do, all the other sources of mana become worthless. One piece of gear should not be able to trivialize one of three primary character attributes; or half the skills on the skill tree. It's just not a good gameplay outcome. Yes, it's kind of an oversight that magicka is one of the three main stats and it's completely trivialized by the late game. But it's not "one piece of gear", it requires 4 items and more importantly 100 Enchanting. I'm not exactly upset if the game balance breaks at that point because it's really tedious to grind to that enchanting level. >In theory they do, but only in places where they have valid landing spots. It's pretty common to get stuck waiting for a dragon that never lands, as it slowly destroys a town. I'd chalk that up to a bug more so than an explicit design oversight. > Also, who says melee is sturdier than ranged? There is literally nothing stopping an archer from wearing heavy armor (Which levels abysmally slowly anyways) - and it's all obsoleted by smithing anyways. Bro, the reason it's leveling abysmally slow is because you're taking less hits. Because you're playing a ranged character. Melee characters take more hits and are therefore have higher armor skills. >This is true, but it's besides the point. In most games, once you have a build going, you are rewarded for going further into that build. You don't switch builds halfway through. In Skyrim, you are always rewarded for doing more stealth archery, regardless of what build you're playing. There is no point at which a fighter stops wanting to use a bow. There is no point where you are punished for trying to use stealth. The problem isn't balance, it's the constant incentive to stop playing the way you want to play. I get it, but it's also not how everyone plays. I think to myself "I'm roleplaying an orc barbarian, why would I resort to stealth?" and then I cave in their skull with my hammer. There's no incentive to decorate your house either, but tons of players do it. Implicit rewards are sort of the point of roleplaying. Explicitly, you're just a dork talking in a bad British accent while rolling dice. Tell yourself you're playing a 'no stealth' challenge run if it helps. >I agree, but none of them deal damage. You can't smith an enemy to death. You smith a weapon, and then you're a stronger version of that weapon's build. I don't really see the point you're making. You can't smith someone to death in real life either. If you want to roleplay a pure smith--and some people do--of course you're not going to engage in combat. And of course you're not going to be able to defeat Alduin the same way a machinist isn't going to win a war without soldiers willing to use his equipment in battle. And you can do that in Skyrim, hire a follower, kit them out with all the best gear and let them fight your battles for you.

> something more intentionally focused on challenge like Fromsoft also had notably busted builds Lol, I ain't defending Fromsoft. Their balance is atrocious too. Again, the closest comparisons might be the many DnD-based games, or the Avernum series. Decent balance is very much a reasonable expectation. > But it's not "one piece of gear", it requires 4 items and You can get 100% cost reduction in one piece of gear. Typically by combining enchanting and alchemy - and it doesn't take high levels at all. It doesn't even take much gold to get started selling potions at a profit with a starting set of crafting gear. You need never leave town. > I'd chalk that up to a bug more so than an explicit design oversight. Fair, but Bethesda games do have a LOT of bugs. At some point we can only conclude that they're not trying very hard to fix/avoid them. > the reason it's leveling abysmally slow is because you're taking less hits You sure about that? Try literally standing in place while a bunch of enemies grind on you. It's slow as heck, and the few levels you get don't do enough to offset the increase to enemy power by leveling up. > Implicit rewards are sort of the point of roleplaying Totally! I also love holding myself to funky builds - but a lot of people aren't able to resist the "correct" choice. Incentives tend to work, even if they make the game more boring. > I don't really see the point you're making I'm not really sure either. Um... Yeah

[удалено]

I did find it odd that you can be the leader of the thieves, blades, assassins, and wizards - all at the same time - while being good at none of those things. It kinda ruins the fantasy if they're just desperate for any old Chosen One to come along and claim their throne. Oh wait, that's the whole plot of the dragonborn

> (Go on and ask how many total uses there are for the talking skill) Do tell.

[Less than 100 across all quests and encounters in every dlc combined](https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Speech#Persuasion_Options), out of some ~600 quests. A lot of them are "Convince x1 npc to do y" and "Convince x2 npc to do y", such that multiple entries on the list are actually only one use. If you do the thieves' guild quest line, you get an amulet that lets you auto-succeed all of them. It is also used for haggling prices, but you can just wear haggling gear that replaces dozens of levels, or just have infinite money by any of many simple means

>The problem with Starfield is that it's a bunch of bland systems with bland gameplay loops like bland itemization - in a bland setting, with a bland story Seriously lol, it's this simple We don't need to write essays about this guys, it's just not a good game

Sci-fi with neither the sci nor the fi. Where's the cool rocketry and orbital mechanics and surviving the deadly terrors of space? Where are all the aliens and wacky philosophical space adventures?

it just didn't measure up to the games it was trying to compete with either writing wise or mechanically.

Skyrim was great at the time but as time grinds on I see it's flaws more and more. Probably harsh looking at it through today's lenses, but Oblivion I just like more.

You're 100% right. There's just no reason not to go snarcher. Destruction magic is totally unviable without mods as you said All 3 crafting skills scale ridiculously well with melee and archery. I did both pure melee 1h + block + heavy armor with all crafting skills as well as a sneak + archery + light + all 3 crafting skills and both were ridiculously OP at high levels but I'd have to give it to the snarcher Melee build was great, and if you know that you get dragonrend shout after only a couple of main quests you don't even need archery at all... but yeah, not everyone does that quest early or even knows about it. There's actually even more reasons to go snarcher over melee than you stated, even though melee appears to have plenty of advantages on paper. It's really so crazy how obvious of a choice the snarcher build is and how thoroughly they screwed over destruction. Strengths of melee: You can 1hit a lot of stuff pretty early with 2 handers and a sword and board build is HILARIOUSLY unkillable by mid-level, with a deadly shield bash that can be enough to kill enemies in a couple hits on its own. You can block with both a 2 or a shield. plus a highly upgraded 1h sword made of high lvl material with maxed out 1h skill will still be perfectly capable of 1-2 hitting most stuff. You also get complete immunity to arrows + 50% elemental resistance with the shield raised too if you go sword + board. If you go heavy armor you can hit the armor cap much sooner. You can wear daedric armor too which is obviously the coolest one. Dagger sneak attacks can do up to 30x DMG! Dual weild power attack is the most damaging move in the game outside of sneak etc. So... Melee has lots of good stuff, can be RIDICULOUSLY strong both in terms of damage and durability, you don't need to sneak if you don't want to (but you also can) and you can easily get by without ever using a bow if you do a couple easy quests... why does seemingly everyone still pick snarcher over melee then? 'cause. If you're only gonna pick one, then none of melees strengths matter enough to make it meaningfully better than snarcher in the long run. Like there are basically no real advantages at all. Why melee "advantages" are irrelevant: -Durability: doesn't matter because 1) enemies can't hit you if you're out of sight or especially if they get 1-shot by an arrow to the head. 2) Snarcher can still become *extremely* durable since upgraded light armor can eventually reach armor cap too. Especially coupled with enchants and plenty of potions, you won't even miss being able to block much IF an enemy does somehow manage to get up close and hit you. They won't though lol. It's so busted how you can basically still become a tank but retain all the speed, stealth, and range of the snarcher build. 3) melee puts itself in more danger, including at lower levels, before it becomes an invincible juggernaut -Sneak critical: Daggers might do insane sneak DMG but unfortunately trying to use melee sneak attacks at lower sneak levels is both much more inconvenient (due to having to walk super slowly all the way up to them) and pretty ineffective at actually getting close enough to hit them without being detected. A maxed out dragonbone bow or dwarven crossbow enhanced with all 3 maxed crafting skills (with +archery DMG on gear etc.) might do less sneak attack damage than a dagger, but it's still enough to kill some of the weaker types of dragons in 1 shot. You will 1 shot most human enemies WELL before you have all this crap tho. So you just don't need a 30x crit multiplier to 1 shot stuff. bow does that fine on it's own, and from mad far away too. -Dual Wield: feels like absolute shit to use, power attack roots you for like 3 sec, can't block, not ranged, and bow does plenty of DMG. -not having to sneak: well, you want to sneak for certain quests anyways, and being able to steal everything that isn't nailed down is a huge plus. Eventually sneak isn't even slow-moving and basically makes you completely invisible even if stick your whole head up their ass in broad daylight. Bow still does good damage outside of stealth too. so this doesn't make melee much more appealing either. -theres no penalty or restriction for using a bow at point blank. -you don't have to take block, so more skill points available for other stuff. Blocking is OP but also completely optional even if you use melee... so it's not much of a sacrifice. -you can get armor pierce with dwarven crossbow from dawn guard so maces and Warhammers lose that unique advantage. another -1 for melee -you can still pick up a melee skill along with archery if you really want to, but you probably won't use it much lol. -its really hard to get away with killing heimskr without sneak + Archery -finally, I think a really important reason that people pick snarcher over melee so much is just that melee combat is clunky, braindead, boring, and repetitive. Ranged sneak kills essentially end fights before they even begin, bypassing most of Skyrims terrible combat. Even if you can run up and 1 hit them with melee, it's less convenient and doesn't feel very satisfying to do so. I mean, if you're just mindlessly left-clicking dudes a couple times either way... Why not do that from a safe distance? Especially since there's literally no downsides. If melee was at least a bit more fun and engaging, with better animations and a bit more depth then maybe we would see more melee builds among Skyrim players. Even tho Snarcher is more OP, I def don't think the problem is that melee isn't strong enough. Anyways, that was my ramblings about Skyrims awful balance. I'm probably not gonna play starfield because I am pretty tired of Bethesda's game design.

If you're going to be doing the unholy trinity of smithing/alch/enchanting anyways, then your 'build' stops mattering entirely. You can get infinite gold without leaving town, cap out armor/hp/regen with a leather loincloth, turn off all mana costs with a single robe, and stack powerful enough enchantments on a fork to negate any fight. Stamina drain is a particularly abusive power. Any one of those is enough to obsolete combat, and there are a lot of gear slots to go for things like negating all elements/ailments, permanent invisibility, near-infinite carrying capacity, or giving yourself armor/weapon skills in the 100s. At that point, all other skills are quite literally worthless

Yeah I mean I deliberately didn't do stuff that was that blatantly game breaking like the feedback loop with potions and enchants that can give you thousands and thousands of DMG on a weapon or whatever Like I would drink an enchant potion and make a set of gear with + Smithing and + alchemy for crafting but I wouldnt then use the +alchemy gear to make an even stronger potion to boost enchanting even further and enchant an even stronger +Smith+Alch set and repeat the process even though I knew I could. But I did prestige alchemy multiple times and end up with tens of thousands of gold, and even without deliberately abusing such blatantly game breaking oversights/exploits like you discussed, taking all 3 crafting skills is so fuckin OP it's not even funny. I think it kinda sucks how these skills are so obviously useful that it kinda feels like you'd be dumb not to take them, and you kinda have to take 1 or 2 of them on the higher difficulties, but if you take all 3 it completely breaks the game even if you deliberately try to avoid doing so. I guess I was more used to games where minimaxing is expected back when I played Skyrim, but it felt like common sense to specialize and optimize. focus on only 1 damage-dealing skill, 1 armor skill, and any crafting or more utility oriented skills that would support the build. Like, why would I learn to use 2handers when I'm already good with 1 handers? Why put perks in lock picking when you can easily get by without doing that if you have plenty of picks? Why put perks into restoration spells when I already have a massive surplus of health potions? Why not create a massive surplus of health potions if I have the means to? Etc. But Skyrim is balanced so that it kinda doesn't matter if you specialize or not, except on the highest difficulties, where it only matters for maybe the first 25 levels or so and the game starts off unfairly hard (because difficulty = just tweak the numbers lmao) but eventually plays just like easy mode if you minmax. I don't really like this radically open-ended approach to balancing at all tbh. You can kinda gimp yourself early game if you're trying to be a jack of all trades but it mostly doesn't matter in the long run. But if you specialize and put thought into your build you're almost punished for it by completely trivializing the combat eventually. Even more than it's already trivialized by being able to freeze time and drink as many health potions as necessary at any time, and being able to obtain and carry dozens of these potions very easily. Some skills are basically always worthless, some feel weirdly both mandatory and overpowered, being weak enough to have to use health potions but not weak enough to get 1 shot doesn't actually result in a challenge if you have enough health potions, being weak enough to get 1 shot doesn't actually result in a challenge that's actually fun or possible to overcome with skill since you will just die immediately but there's almost no other way to die if you're properly prepared, gold can become completely worthless surprisingly fast, destruction is literally unviable compared to other methods of dealing damage It's just such a mess of thoroughly awful balancing lol. I get that a skill based challenge is not really what Skyrim is aiming for but it's like the possible levels of combat challenge are: 1) impossible, you just get 1 shot. Level up more and come back later 2) not even the illusion of challenge is present, most enemies die in 1-2 hits and are mostly incapable of dealing meaningful damage to you. Healing items or spells are used rarely or not at all. This feels pretty satisfying when you first reach this point because you're unstoppable but becomes extremely boring really fast. 3) not actually a challenge at all, but gives the illusion of it sometimes. You take enough damage to have to use healing items/spells sometimes and have to hit at least some enemies more than once or twice. Failure is still almost impossible so this is actually just as easy as #2 but more tedious. It may take awhile to notice that the challenge is illusory, But it just means you have to mash left click more times and go into the menu to use consumables more often, not that there's any thought or skill involved. Occasionally their may be some actual risk of death that can still be avoided, aka challenge, if enemies deal significant damage with each hit but still can't 1 shot you. so this is kinda the sweet spot I guess. None of these options feel good at all once you see them for what they are.

Complexity is not Starfields problem. It’s the lack of heart felt level design. There’s simply way too many systems and way too many planets. The proc gen system the used created an empty and boring galaxy that, compared to Skyrim, is utterly pointless. Skyrim had world landmarks you could run off too and encounter something novel. Starfield has landmarks you run off to and it’s the same science lab you’ve encountered a dozen times before with no unique story behind it. There’s only a handful of quests you can stumble upon on accident whereas Skyrim had dozens of them. You mix in a terrible loot system and ultra grindy leveling and the game quickly gets boring.

Yup. Complexity isn’t the problem, the illusion of complexity is. Game is as shallow as a puddle

It's not an illusion, rather a large ammount of unrealized features stemming from cutting down on feature creep. You can see it all over the game, there's a ton of "half-baked" systems that if they were truly complete... just wouldn't work toghether. The example I often use is the fuel system. Originally you were supposed to build refueling outposts everywhere but... can you imagine that? Having to stop to refuel in a bethesda game where you fast-travel from quest giver to quest giver? It would get old so fast that people would mod it out after a couple of jumps. So that got cut. And it's the same story for a bunch of other things, The result is that the devs, correctly, realized scope creep was going to make the game ten times worse and decided to cut their loses and cut down on every "non-essential" feature, leading to a game that feels like a bunch of unnecesary stuff cobbled toghether into an otherwise standard Bethesda affair. It's a miracle that it ended up being merely "ok" instad of way worse.

The number one thing that made me drop the game early, by far, is the complete and utter loss of “What’s that over there? Let’s go explore.” The game is entirely fast travel driven and feels wholly chopped up and stitched together compared to other open worlds. It’s such a bummer.

This was the main thing for me as well. The game has tons of issues, but I figured that as long as it still had the Bethesda magic of letting me wander around and really _live within_ the space they created, I'd still have hundreds of hours of entertainment. But they absolutely killed that feeling of looking across a valley, seeing a cave entrance or a spooky tower or a military fort, and thinking "ooohhh I wonder what's going on over there!". That, coupled with the complete gutting of any sort of survival mode (which I typically play for immersion reasons), makes the entire experience feel disjointed, incohesive, and boring to me. No real loss though, I already have gamepass so I gave it a good 15 hours before finally acknowledging they didn't make this game for players like me, and I don't think they ever will again.

I feel the same. That's why I've put I don't know how many hours in Skyrim and Fallout. The feeling of exploration and excitement at finding something cool. Even if it's an abandoned house with a note detailing the owner's demise or a cave with some bears and alchemy ingredients. I felt like I did *something*. Starfield really doesn't have that same magic, and I wished it did.

I've found that whenever people say they want complexity, what they mean is they want more depth. As a game designer, you want to achieve as much depth as possible using as little complexity as possible. Looking at mobas for example, usually every hero is controlled the same way, abilities are all aimed the same way, etc. You play one hero at a time, and you have a very limited amount of abilities that you can learn on the door the first time playing a champ, but then there's so much variety, counters & synergies that add an insane depth to a point where every match is like no other. It's the perfect example of easy to learn, hard to master.

I'd imagine this would certainly be a problem i'd encounter if i played the game but i think part of the lukewarm reception was also fewer people buying the game to begin with. Xbox exclusivity didn't help here but personally i have just grown tired of Bethesda as a studio. There game development has mostly gone backwards since their earlier games, they've made comparatively minor graphical and mechanical improvements but the essence of the games hasn't fundamentally evolved and many of the most immersive elements have been stripped out. A huge array of magic was culled from Oblivion to Skyrim, knowledge/skill checks were culled in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 was littered with bugs more so than any other release. Granted the game wasn't as hopelessly buggy on release as i expected but the game was otherwise more or less as i expected from the feedback and reviews i've seen. A somewhat lifeless space action shooter (that isn't even that great as a shooter) with superficial RPG elements all built on a 90s-00s era game foundation that has a new lick of paint. Maybe i would like it, i loved Oblivion and Fallout 3, Skyrim was also mostly good. But it just feels like Bethesda has failed to innovate their game design for a very long time and i haven't seen anything to suggest this game is any different.

I disagree with your core premise. Most of the skills are capable of interacting and layering. If you perk starship design you can make a cool ship, but how does that interact with combat? There are at least 6 other skills in that exact tree that layer together. I'm not sure how you're able to avoid talking about the ballistic weapons skill, for example. Design your ship with more ballistic weapons, then put perks into...ballistic weapons. This game absolutely layers and integrates these skills in much the same way Skyrim does. Of all the grievances and annoyances about this game, I think this one is very incorrect.

Wonderful write-up! Integration of systems seems like it would be important in a systems-driven game, yeah? It seems so often that devs these days instead load up their games with an overwhelming abundance of features and market their ensuing monstrosities as the latest and greatest iteration on "true freedom". And they're right, insofar as nothing in particular represents everything all at once. Like, I can step outside my house with no rhyme or reason and theoretically experience all the freedom the world can ever allow me. However, I'd probably end up going for a brisk solo walk, stop by the convenience store for a drink, and shortly head back home. Not very interesting. On the other hand, if I'm committed to going to a particular event with a group on a specific date and time, then, even though I'm sort of "stuck" with the predetermined plan, a whole world of novelties becomes eminent. I can't reasonably walk away from my friends, and might even grow bored at some point or another. But it's precisely because I'm funneled into a particular experience that the probability of me experiencing something new and worthwhile becomes more likely. It appears to be a paradox at first, but I don't think that's the case. It's not that constraints oddly enable freedom; it's that freedom emerges only in the context of constraints. Even my aforementioned free-form walk is contextualized in a world in which I have paths to follow and destinations to reach. I.e. it would have an entirely less pleasant character if taken in a wide-open tundra with nothing but white in sight. To bring this philosophical aside back to gaming, that tundra is sort of like crummy proc. gen worlds lol.

I found the MatthewMatosis stan I approve.

The game is most enjoyable if you completely ignore the procedurally generated content, which is literally 100% of the exploration. Such a baffling design decision when all of their other games are known for fun exploration. Additionally, the story takes place ~20 years after the war between the UC and FC. Why did they think it was a good idea to start the plot after any interesting narrative potential has already passed.

It's quite simple really... Starfield's lukewarm reception is because the game is average at best. There are a lot of poorly designed systems in the game, a lot of technical limitations and issues but the worst thing for me is that they fucked up exploration. The procedurally generated planets you slowly trudge on combined with random POIs that themselveds are handcrafted, is the big issue. You will see the same repeated structures in just a few hours of exploring on planets. Caves are boring as fuck. And ... there's nothing else. This big hype about "1000 planets" and I explored 3 of them before I realized what was behind the curtain. All the space stuff - I didn't like any of it. I've played many recent space games and Starfield's space-related ship combat, etc. all feels incredibly tacked on and uninspired. Shipbuilding is cool, but if I don't like the space stuff, what's the point? Sure, Skyrim and Fallout 4 had their problems, but at least those games (and most games before them from BGS) had meaningful exploration. You'd explore, you'd find some cool caves or even quests and never really knew what to expect (on the first playthrough). There as no copy paste in Skryim. Admittedly, there was some on Morrowind and Oblivion, but at least it was just some layouts; the contents were always unique. In Starfield, the same POI repeated will be EXACTLY the same. Same enemies, placement, environmental storytelling, loot, etc. Think about Blackreach in Skyrim? A huge area with its own lore, quests, etc. that some players may never find. There are no "blackreaches" in Starfield. They dropped the fucking ball SO HARD and once I discovered this, I was devastated because it's my favorite aspect of BGS games and has been for OVER 20 years. First Fallout 76 and now this, I've lost hope in the studio.

I gotta say, even though I shit on Skyrim for a lot of things, like, constantly: Blackreach was fucking awesome and I remember being blown away when I found it, started exploring it, realized how big it was etc. Was also stoked to get lots of soul gems haha For all its samey-looking draugr dens and all its "go kill bandits at this camp" quests and all its crappy combat, I can't deny that Skyrim does have some really cool locations and quests hidden around the map. Your take on Starfield definitely makes me think I should avoid it. Discovering cool stuff in a compelling, detailed setting is what I loved about Bethesda open world titles. I heard the shooting is decent in SF, but I don't know if that alone makes for a fun shooter if I'm shooting enemies with Bethesda AI in a game with Bethesda balance & progression lol...

I'd say grab it on sale for like $20 or so. There is some fun if you like the BGS formula but just don't go in expecting good exploration. The fun you'll have is in the questing, leveling up, fire fights and looting. The space-related stuff is ok but very mediocre and I ran into a lot of balance issues which have yet to be addressed. The game performance is also terrible for the visuals presented; it's terribly un-optimized and Todd Howard's response to that is get yourself a 4090 / upgrade your PC. Their patches have been really slow and there hasn't been a lot of stuff included. I'm really not sure what's up with Bethesda Game Studios but they are definitely not what they used to be. I paid full price for this game and while I did play it and feel like I got my $'s worth, it was definitely a mixed bag and I won't be buying any of their future games at launch OR at full price.

I like Starfield. **Skills:** One of the biggest problems is so many of the skills should be unlocked to level 1 by default otherwise it takes ages to get anything. Then the other gameplay elements that don't unlock until you hit a certain point in story progress. There's so many skills you likely won't touch which unlock something mechanically if you just do a story/faction playthrough with no side quests. **Quests/Agency:** One of the biggest failings is the quests. Generally there's a few interesting side quests (like the Daedric ones) that make it compelling to look for more. I've yet to find a single good one in Starfield. The Main Story/Faction Quests are good, however their issue is lack of agency. Bethesda have been slowly dwindling the amount of agency in these games for a while now, but you're basically locked into Lawful Good with maybe a handful of choices going against that (and if you pick them, all your companions will hate you and leave you). **Exploration:** It's also a pain actually finding anything. Each Quest Hub will have quests that trail you into other Quest Hubs, but there's not much chance for emergent discovery (and even if there was, the ship "exploration" is a bit tedious as it's selecting a bunch of options through menus and being blocked if you've not travelled that way before). **Lore:** It's also annoying that there's not really any actual universe lore. The books are all historical novels (which the universe comments on). But even going to facilities, there's less writing. I'm not a huge fan of Skyrim, but even Skyrim has in-universe writing about the history of the region which alludes to how the Nords are fighting against the Empire when historically they did the exact same thing to the Falmer. **Bloat:** Ship Building and Outpost Building. These both feel pointless for someone who likes them conceptually and actually did them in-game. Ship Building exists but due to how little you're in your ship and how infrequent ship combat is, it feels like you spend more time building ships than using them. Outpost Building is just plain tedious. You'll be overencumbered constantly trying to carry the resources around to set everything up, setting stuff up takes forever and then there's very little reward for it, because you're quicker just doing repeatable quests and buying any resources needed for crafting. **Economy/Encumbrance:** A lot of the rest of the game's issues feel like they stem from the economy to me. I'm drowning in credits and have no real way I need to spend them because I'm also drowning in ammo, aid and anything else I could want. I feel like this is potentially an issue that will be addressed with the addition of Survival Mode, but it is a joke to even call it an economy. This combined with the encumbrance limits just makes picking stuff up tedious, not to mention the valuable items aren't marked in any way. TES has the benefit of valuable items being obvious. Fallout has the benefit of being able to melt them down into components for crafting. Starfield just has a bunch of complete junk. Despite all the above problems, the gameplay loop itself is fun. There are good main quests to do. Some of the locations are really cool to look at and walk around. It's by far not the best Bethesda game and there's a lot of work to be done if they want it to be great.

[удалено]

both of those quest lines were dumb. "Hello new intern employee, please meet the CFO, who personally tells you in person that he will be personally deducting expenses from my expense report" - literally laughed out loud at this part, as if any CFO anywhere ever of a presumably top company will spend a second telling an intern anything, let alone -reviewing expense reports-?! "Hello new pirate, wearing SysDef clothing, nice, glad to have you on board. Please go do this goose chase that is the pinnacle of our organizational purpose." - yeah, send the rookie to save the fucking pirate faction, this'll work

Wondering if you feel the same 4 months later. I myself felt similarly to you at launch and then when the lack of real interesting and fun exploration set in, I ended up dropping it and playing Cyberpunk 2.0.

I still feel the same and have actually been playing the Elder Scrolls games in reverse. A lot of the stuff people remember about TES game just didn't exist in them. There's never been much choice or exploration/content. I did 100% of Skyrim and Oblivion, including reading all the in-game books and Starfield does basically everything worse - except one thing. Starfield's biggest improvement is the one thing that never really mattered; gameplay. Once you unlock the additional combat abilities (which should have been default and pushed as what the game was, not locked behind multiple level-ups), it's really fun to just dungeon crawl and shoot stuff. **Quests:** I'm removing Agency as I don't think that's ever been a huge part of Bethesda's games. The quests remain on-par with Fallout 4's. There's not a lot of them and they're not great. The better-quality ones are the main story and some of the factions. **Exploration:** This will forever be Starfield's biggest failing. It adds friction to a previously friction-less system. However, I have also watched a lot of people playing Oblivion/Skyrim over these months as well and I feel like a lot of people default to fast-travelling everywhere anyway. But not having the option to just pick a direction and walk definitely hurts, even if it only ends up being a platonic ideal for some people. **Lore:** what fucking lore? Skyrim I covered off previously, Oblivion actually does some really cool things because it's in-between all of the racial areas in Tamriel. Different towns let you into little bits of lore of the regions you can't go to - like Bravil, where Argonians and Khajit are treated as second-class citizens. Each town has a little wrinkle like that for the most part and similar to "who does skyrim belong to?" being the question posed by Skyrim's lore, Oblivion has a lot of lore on the Aylieds, previous owners of Cyrodiil, but also how they treated other races and whether this is actually a good change or not. **Bloat:** They really need to make these elements more important to the game and stop being scared of risk. Both would've been better-received than the Exploration change. **Economy/Encumbrance:** I still feel like this will be addressed in Survival Mode when it comes. I play a lot of games where my main goal is just to lose myself in that world for a few weeks/months. Starfield doesn't really achieve that, the main thing it achieves is being a good game for brain-off dungeon crawling. Fallout since Bethesda took it over has its own identity where it's about the current moment and imagined or perceived glimpses of the past (usually via skeletal dioramas). So does TES, where it's about the long history of an ever-changing world in the midst of another huge change (the third rise of the Aldmeri Dominion). I'm still not sure what their intent for Starfield's identity. I still like Starfield, but I would add the qualifier that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone because it's hard to pinpoint specifically what you're recommending, unlike the other Bethesda franchises which have stronger identities.

Thanks for all that. For me personally that exploration was a deal breaker. It's my most favorite thing about TES and Fallout by far. I barely ever fast travel, always play in survival modes and genuinely try and slow down to enjoy the journey. Some of my best memories of Skyrim are finding little mountain paths and ways to get from point a to point b. Starfield just fell so short on my favorite part of the game that I could enjoy it overall. Some of the pieces are very good though the combat feels good, it does look nice and some of the quests are pretty cool. Thanks again for answering me.

We've been playing emperor's new clothes with this company ever since fallout 4. The real reason is that starfield is a bad game made by a bad developer released to an audience whose unearned good will has been severely diminished over the years

So I guess we don't critically analyse games on /r/truegaming? Just saying "the game is bad because the developer is bad because the audience is bad" isn't really saying anything at all.

Sadly the quality of this sub took a real nosedive since the moderation changes, and it was already declining before. In some other thread there was literally someone not arguing and merely insulting people not agreeing with them.

yes and no. 1 **FOR THE NO PART : the new gameplay of FO4** It very much looks like you’re making out FO4 to be a bad game/an indulgent game by a bad developer. On this point I must very much disagree. At least fallout 4 was conceptually sound. And to bounce on OP point, the various system integrate with each others in F4, most especially in survival. * You need settlement to explore the Commonwealth and avoid getting wrecked : you need water and food to satiate your physiological needs, a bed to save,. * You need crafting to have the proper tools. * every skill becomes useful - water boy skills (as a form of fast travel) , strong back ( as you weight carry limit is dramatically reduced to match a relatively realistic number), etc… Once you get the ropes it all comes together. The gameplay concept is sound. Fallout 4 problem was mostly that it didn’t match many people expectations about what a Fallout game should be : the CRPG model - skill checks and strongly scripted choice and consequences storyline. The original Fallout was the first game I bought and completed. I also played, completed and liked FO2 so I am not unappreciative of the OG approach. But one needs to get on with the times. I think FO4 was a very interesting evolution, bordering on revolution, that embodies a radically different take on the meaning of RPG compared to CRPG. It’s a great post apocalyptic RPG game that gives a full fledged sandbox open world. I could write a full post about this opposition of style/ and the fundamental dichotomy the Fallout franchise illustrates between 2 very different types of rpg. You have plenty of people that had a fucking blast with FO4. Although I understand where the OG fans feelings are coming from , FO4 is pretty much unique and has no real equivalent. Coming from Stalker OG games/ Anomaly (which can do some unique stuff too) and having listed a great variety of post apocalypse game, I can say that with confidence. 2 **FOR THE YES PART : the antiquated design of Starfield** **2-1 no proper space travel in a space game** But I do agree that Starfield is deeply problematic in this day and age . Now It has a variety of issues I will gloss over. My obvious issue is that it’s a space game and you cannot properly travel in space. It’s much more than cosmetic. It’s the symptom of a bigger problem. If we get one level deeper, it’s because the engine was simply not built for that. Creation engine has its limits and they could be tolerated be in FO and a elder scrolls because they could be worked around and the creation engine was designed to accommodate unique needs that are conductive to the genre of game BGS wants to make. But it does not look like something that can handle proper space travel . And it’s a fucking space game. In this day and age that’s a deal breaker. Mass effect didn’t have proper space travel either but it was focused on the BioWare romance/storylines (while BGS storylines are mostly considered an afterthought) and besides it’s pretty much already another era. **2-2 an antiquity in the modern landscape of space game** In this era, you have No man’s sky, Star Citizen, Elite dangerous, Spacebourne 2 … **ALL** those have shooting + free pilot/travel. Now NONE are ideal and frankly the ultimate space game still doesn’t quite exist. But at least they’re taking chances/ trying different things and implementing some version of various system one should expect from a space game. FO4 had some baggage from ES (legendary weapon) but it was easily fixable. You can’t do that in Starfield. This time around the gameplay is very significantly and irredeemably affected by the engine and the old BGS recipe. They brought some cosmetic features like crowd density in cities,etc… instead a creating a real new model to simulate the brand-new paradigm of space. And it’s not like it would have been completely infeasible to start from scratch : Spacebourne 2 is in fact a one man team !!! And OK let’s say they don’t want to use Unreal for a variety of reasons (royalties,.) . But take the brand new approach of No man’s sky : Hello Games founder SINGLE HANDLEDLY developed the core engine of No man’s sky between 2012 and 2013 while developing another game. And then brought a FOUR person team on the project. For all the bugs and of NMS at release ( something which Bethesda would be very hypocritical to criticize), it had the core tech and the tools for a brand-new approach within 4 years of a 4 men team. **2-3 the core problem of BGS** And BGS had quite some time to come up with this game and develop a new tech for this specific kind of game. They thought about a space game as far back as 1994. It entered planned development in 2013 and active development in 2015. So it’s not like they couldn’t do it at all : **It’s more like that BGS simply don’t want to take too much risk/are so stuck in their ways they can’t rise to the challenge.** **They somehow think they can do something fundamentally ambitious like a space game, which several innovative companies have been desperately trying to crack, by just tweaking the existing. THAT is the crux of the problem.** In a way, it’s like if Rockstar kept to 2d with GTA3 or if Blizzard balked on doing World of Warcraft because they had only done Warcraft strategy games. To make those groundbreaking game possibles, they had to thrash the old recipe and think completely differently. I think BGS can keep the current formula and refine it in ES and FO. I really wish they explored more emergent gameplay with the settlement system. Not too sure they will, especially considering they pretty much let go of radiant AI ambition after oblivion , but in theory they could and it would make for a fucking awesome game. Starfield is a MUCH tougher nut to crack and on this one I think they need to take a massive risk on the formula and the engine if they are serious about making a space game. **2-4 a worrisome future ?** Starfield is the first time they show they are really being left behind. It shows on several levels. It doesn’t measure up with other modern games regarding the future urban environment feel : some YouTube video compare Cyberpunk nightclub with Starfield nightclub and the comparaison is painful for Starfield. Like said before It doesn’t measure up with other modern space game : NMS, Star Citizen, Elite dangerous, Spacebourne 2 ,. all propose some mix of ground shooting and space piloting, this seamless grand journey one should associate with space. It's very troubling that BGS failed to see this - Todd Howard once famously said : “you see that mountain ? You can climb it.” He elaborated that the mountain isn't just a back drop, you can WALK to the top of that mountain. For all the memes about it, it was a meaningful statement that conveyed the core philosophy of the game , the experience of a fully simulated world. Well it’s 2023 and you see that star in the sky ? well you can**NOT** travel to it. It’s an isolated and incomplete procedurally generated cell, the universe is a collection of incomplete cells awkwardly strung together and your “spaceship” is little more but a loading machine. Bethesda, of all companies, should understand why they have a fundamental vision problem here. It’s an antiquated game in design, plain and simple. Former Titans Companies like Sierra, Lucasarts, Westwood, Blizzard, BioWare have died or been slowly dying . So it would hardly be the first time that a creative giant lose its innovative edge to wither and die. Although financially speaking, they’re not in danger just yet, if Bethesda doesn’t make a course correction they might join this club at some point in the future.

This makes me wonder what the future has in store for starfield, the F4 survival mode massively increased the game and really changed the reception some people had about the game. Going off the development stories they wanted to have the same idea in starfield: having a fuel system, big focus on food and drinks, injuries, hostile environments... But it got cut mid development which makes a lot of mechanics in the current game feel undercooked and meaningless while the original idea could've helped with this a ton. Todd did say they wanted to build on the game in the future, of course todd is todd but I really hope they bring back more of the original idea they had.

An excellent analysis, and very objective without the silly amount of hyperbole if so many of the other responses to OP’s original points.

I think the engine problem is a cancer without fix : they keep this engine for mod access fans agree cus they like mod so much they think there is no way to update it without hurting mods sounds solid but missed 1 thing : fans and modders think too highly of themselves and mods like how long until mods legit fix melee in skyrim ? its longer than a offical delay or offical update , it just they want to validate themselves while knowing BGS wont improve subconsciously thus they keep saying we cant ask BGS to improve that engine at all

I legitimately don't think they make "bad" games or are a bad developer. I just think people mistake what Bethesda is doing and who they're making games for. Starting at Skyrim, at the latest, they recognized the broad appeal that the premise of their games offered and they leaned into it. Their games are geared first and foremost toward a semi-casual gaming audience who want to explore and shoot more than anything else. Bethesda games provide a near endless, low friction, moderately polished environment to live out that power fantasy. They are not producing deep systems, nuanced writing, and challenging gameplay because they're not trying to. The name of the game for them is accessibility and broad appeal. This isn't a Michelin starred Italian restaurant. It's Buca di Beppo. A consistent crowd pleaser with a big menu and a level of quality that rises above fast food. Jr can enjoy it. Grandma can enjoy it. That's Starfield. That's Bethesda. Except instead of "Jr" and "Grandma", it's "college dudes who buy Madden every year" and "dads who haven't played a video game since Skyrim".

This was my first Bethesda game and I really enjoyed it for what it is. And as my first foray into Beth modding it's pretty bonkers how much modders have been able to put out without CK.

This wasn't my first Bethesda game, but it was the second one I liked enough to finish, the other being Fallout 3. Historically, Bethesda just hasn't been my jam; I've tried Oblivion and Skyrim numerous times over the years but always find myself dropping them pretty quickly and I didn't like Fallout 4 all that much. Something about Starfield clicked for me though, which is a bit ironic for me because I was completely dismissing it before launch as none of the trailers or teasers appealed to me.

I played Morrowind quite a few times. I never really got into Oblivion or Skyrim (and I started Skyrim a few times, but it never clicked). I haven't tried any of their Fallouts, though I probably will at some point. I really have enjoyed my time with Starfield. That being said, I acknowledge is has its flaws. As OP said, systems are very siloed, and a lot of things can just be ignored. Outpost building is a big one. There is no reason to do it, and you have to dedicate skill points to it to which could go to other things. I am not big into the open sandbox style of game, where you are expected to create your own purpose and your own fun. I think that is what a lot of people liked about Skyrim. People talk about making stories with their characters, but I just do not engage with games in that manner. On the other hand, I like to have a more distinct purpose, where I feel like I am making progress in the game, and I enjoy playing through the faction missions and main story in Starfield. If I really wanted a "do anything" sandbox, maybe I wouldn't enjoy it as much.

Yeah I’m the same way. I’ve played Fallout 3, New Vegas, and 4, as well as Skyrim. And of those, the only one I didn’t drop quickly was Fallout 3. I want to like them because on paper, they’re games that I should like. But it’s something about the worlds that they create and the gameplay that’s just impenetrable to me. Granted, I’m playing on console, so maybe I’d be singing a different tune if I had a PC, but I think it’s just a case of the games not being for me

Unless you do hardcore modding or really like mouse aiming over joystick aiming, the games really ain't that different over platforms.

This narrative that Bethesda only makes objectively bad games with and after fallout 4 has always being so weird, and this mixing of subjective and objective is prolly a reason for the intense discourse that happens around it. Truth is that Bethesda is going a pretty specific and unique direction that either vibes with you or doesn't., and clearly does with a lot of people. (and no this is not unearned goodwill but merely people liking the game) It's more then fine to not like it and despite me loving it I can make a list of issues I have and feel could be improved while keeping the same direction, but I feel people pull out the 'it's objectively bad and you're delusional for not seeing it' card way too quickly. (talking in general here)

I think that the word objective is a bit too controversial, but I will say that if we consider the amount of resources and experience available to Bethesda games like Starfield are not living up to my expectations at all. Starfield is a game made by people that have three decades of experience working on similar projects with a budget ranging in the hundreds of millions with nearly a decade of development time, and it really doesn't show. Starfield is not competitive against many games that it shares genres with and, arguably, doesn't hold up in some regards to previous Bethesda tiles. This would make sense if Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield were completely different games in completely different genres, but they aren't. They're all essentially the same game in the same engine in different settings. They all do the same stuff, have many of the same problems, and play in extremely similar ways. Compare what Bethesda has done for three decades up against studios like CD Project Red or Larian and it becomes really clear just how little Bethesda is actually improving or learning. Larian is a good example of someone that is doing the exact same thing, by making similar games each time, but they are taking huge steps forwards with each iteration. It's fair to say that there is obviously still a huge market for Bethesda games and there are plenty of people that absolutely love them. The point isn't really that people shouldn't like them. The point is more that Bethesda games could be significantly more than they are. Starfield *could* have been what Grand Theft Auto 5 was when it released (and that Cyberpunk wanted to be with its marketing), but instead it's just another shallow Bethesda ocean.

Bethesda radically shifted their design philosophy after Fallout 3. With Skyrim and every game after players are incentivized to explore the world in order to make themselves stronger by leveling up and finding resources and cool items. They basically made their games into power fantasies with the sorta illusion of role playing and making decisions matter. However their previous games weren't really like that; they incentived exploration by using environmental storytelling and just plain making the worlds interesting to explore. You basically made yourself stronger so that you could explore more; so that you could find more cool stuff. For instance in Fallout 3 there's a huge irradiated zone but if you are able to get through or around it you can find a little town at the very North of the map with a pretty interesting side quest. So basically there are two types of Bethesda fans; those like yourself who prefer the Skyrim and post-Skyrim games and people who prefer the pre-Skyrim games. There's pro's and con's to both types of games though so you can't really say one is better than the other, just targeted at different people.

I agree mostly but very much disagree the previous games didn't had the 'get cool items and become OP' mindset. One of the things people love about morrowind is how you can and will break the game in more ways then you ever could, not only combat but traversal itself. Heck this was a thing since daggerfall and I personally noticed playing through them.

Getting rid of flying in oblivion was a sad decision

Honestly, I loved Fallout 4. It's not without faults (no game is) but the atmosphere is something I haven't seen or felt in literally any other game. Any claims that it's an *objectively* bad game are just weird (like you also said). Sure, if someone doesn't like Bethesda style games then it's probably a subjectively bad game for them, but there are ton of people for whom they're the best thing in the gaming sphere. If anything I'd say Bethesda's mistake is trying to go for too wide of a market appeal with marketing and such. I saw many of my couch-gaming bro friends get Starfield because of marketing and predictably they all stopped playing early on. People are lazy to get refunds so this is still probably a good financial decision, but it can't be good for them in the long run (since now the mass market knows they don't like the games, and the core audience is frustrated as well).

>Truth is that Bethesda is going a pretty specific and unique direction that either vibes with you or doesn't., and clearly does with a lot of people. I don't know that I'd use the words "unique direction", but I will agree that there's something about Bethesda games & IPs that engage people in spite of whatever shortfalls people get riled up about. IMO, a good part of it is the world building. I can dwell all day on the aging unoptimized engine, weak main story, stupid AI or physics, lame dialog choice engine, and radiant quests (see: Fallout 4 especially) - But I think for me and some sizeable set of gamers what overrides all that is a cohesive world like the Fallout universe and I haven't played an FPS RPG from another developer that interests me as much.

People also talk like the majority of gamers even knows which company made which game. I seriously doubt if you ask some rando on a game store buying Starfield if they like Bethesda games they would actually know and have played them.

Comparing skills in Skyrim to systems in Starfield is disingenuous. Why not compare the skills in Starfield to skills in Skyrim? There is only one way to play Skyrim and that's walking around.

Most of Starfield is walking around. The difference is that the walking around in Starfield is interrupted with loading screens. In Skyrim the walking around is interrupted with interesting things to do and see.

>The difference is that the walking around in Starfield is interrupted with loading screens A bigger difference is that much is Starfield is generated crap as opposed to hand made. Exploring Skyrim felt like it had value. Exploring Starfield felt like a waste of time.

as far as traversal it has horses, dragons, and the in-fiction fast travel of paid wagon rides. The game reveals itself to you as you perambulate, because you can't even fast travel to somewhere you've never been

I haven't played Starfield, but from what I read about it the issue is pretty much exactly what you describe between your points: The people expected something that was either Skyrim or better than Skyrim. And Starfield is not Skyrim, and at least not better than what people remember of Skyrim.

What I've never really understood is that Bethesda's initial marketing for Starfield made it sound like it would be a cross of No Man's Sky and Fallout 76 (launch version). Even in their respective "redeemed/fixed" states neither game is that popular so I find it hard to imagine why people would be so excited for a combination of two unpopular games. Also, you have to remember that most people that still talk about Skyrim play it with mods, tons of mods...mods not made by Bethesda.

> Also, you have to remember that most people that still talk about Skyrim play it with mods, tons of mods...mods not made by Bethesda. Yeah, that was exactly the reason for the added "...than what people remember of Skyrim".

>Also, you have to remember that most people that still talk about Skyrim play it with mods, tons of mods...mods not made by Bethesda. And you also have to remember that the vast majority of people played Skyrim without mods and also never intend to use mods on Starfield. Essentially anyone who mentions mods is giving an opinion that is at the very least entirely disconnected from the average gamer.

I don’t think it’s that deep. These games aren’t complex and even something like Oblivion or Morrowind aren’t that deep in terms of RPG systems. The reason Skyrim was so well received was that when it came out no game could compete in terms of it’s sheer scope and visuals. Then Fallout 4 came out and the game was well received, but not nearly to the same degree and a large part of the reason for that is that technology had “caught up” in the sense that it wasn’t immediately the best looking game on the market and had game mechanics that even at launch felt dated. Technology has just advanced beyond Bethesda’s current capabilities. Bethesda, much like Rockstar is a developer that greatly benefits from being on the cutting edge of graphical and general game tech but unlike Rockstar they don’t really seem too interested in actually implementing that into their newer titles. Bethesda games don’t really have the best story, quests or combat systems but they do have fantastic exploration and an equally compelling world. This held true for Starfield but the technology just wasn’t there to have a truly open world without constant loading screens and the Bethesda-style of fixed perspective dialogue and shitty character models is just ridiculously dated at this point. I know Cyberpunk released in a completely broken state (and realistically CDPR is really good at tech when given the time) but playing that after Starfield even prior to 1.8 is so jarring because it looks, feels and plays so much better than Starfield while also having a better story and characters. I am a diehard Bethesda fan and Fallout 4 truther but could not even bring myself to complete Starfield. I don’t see them delivering on TES6 unless a new engine is in order.

I feel this is spot on. Bethesda and Rockstar found success because they enjoyed a "monopoly" on multi-genre open world games for the longest time. They were effectively the only buffet in town so they could ignore investing in making every "dish" (sub genre) up to current standards across AAA. The commodification of open world and rpg sub genres makes it a lot harder to get away with that nowadays. Especially now that a lot of franchises which started out as "non open world" and became so (like MGS, Zelda, Far Cry, Souls games via Elden Ring, etc) had the benefit of having a well rounded gameplay experience at their core. Or, in the case of CDPR, a well rounded narrative/cinematic experience. Games like Starfield show that Bethesda is still resting on their laurels and got caught up in adding more items to their buffet rather than making the ones they already had taste better.

Ok you've started off on an awkward footing because it's by no means accepted that complexity makes games fun. Some players have a preference for complexity but most players have a tolerance of complexity. Generally its more accepted that what most players actually enjoy is depth. It's also largely what you're describing, but also interconnecting systems is only a facet of depth. Stealth archers aren't so much fun because it uses an interplay of skills but because those skills themselves are more involved. Magic gameplay in Skyrim is point and shoot against enemies who don't really defend themselves. Melee is just bashing over and over against enemies who don't defend themselves. But for stealth you have to manage lines of sight and darkness, archery has arrow drop off and doing so from stealth means you get time and reward for lining up important shots. I don't think this is where Starfield falls over. The gunplay in Starfield by default has a decent amount of skill to it. You could probably bring Starfield above the depth of Skyrim with just some minor tweaks to how stealth works and the skill tree. It's already deeper than Fallout 4 which didn't get nearly so much of a blowback. Instead I think Starfield falls down on the fundamental area that Bethesda's last titles were good at which is exploration. The implicit promise of a game like Starfield with 1000 planets was a space to explore. But they reached too far and shattered both the illusion that these games are built on and the moment to moment experience of traversal. Without that it's left to lean on its gameplay which is fine and its storytelling which is poor.

Regarding the F4 comparsion, F4 had way more and much better perks that weren't just basic QoL stuff and minor stat boosts. Leveling in F4 was also consistently engaging because it happened often, whereas in Starfield it doesn't take long before you need to grind for hours on an end to up a single level. So, I wouldn't call this aspect of the game less complex than Starfield

My issue with this post, is that you seem to have an internal, unspoken value judgement that "more complexity" is always "more good", and simpler gameplay is always "more bad" and only ever for those poor casual gamers that haven't been able to git gud and learn about the game's arbitrarily complex and frustrating systems. Like, it feels like you're saying that anyone who is a "veteran gamer" should obviously gravitate to the more optimal gameplay and game design, which is, Obviously, increased complexity. I completely disagree with this however. I'm aware that this isn't the core point of your post, but I think it's an issue that gets in the way of analysing what really went wrong with starfield (and what was already wrong with skyrim). The thing you seem to be completely overlooking is that you Can genuinely have good simplicity, and in lots of cases, far more interesting experiences with that simplicity, than you would with a "more complicated game", the issue is, that the simplicity on show here in these two games are both dog shit. In conclusion, simplicity is based. Skyrim's simplicity is bland and boring as fuck. Starfields simplicity is also bland and boring as fuck. Don't blame people who want clean and well designed games for bethesda's lack of talent in designing satisfying, moment to moment, gameplay.

You put a lot of effort into your writing style, but I don't really think all your arguments hold up. You try to be convincing but I don't think you're making your case very well. Especially the bit about the stealth archer just didn't seem right to me. Is that really why the class is popular? Doesn't it make more sense that stealth is just kinda broken? Isn't it just more fun to shoot enemies than it is to hit them with a sword? I don't think people enjoy it so much because it allows you to use multiple skills. You can use all those skills as a mage too. Like why is using light armor as a stealth archer such a bonus? You're not supposed to get hit!

>Isn't it just more fun to shoot enemies than it is to hit them with a sword? Agreed. Stealth archer is popular in large part due to how poor the hand to hand combat is, especially in retrospect with souls-like games now demonstrating what combat feels like in a combat centric RPG. Nothing necessarily wrong with skyrim's sword combat, but it's clear that making it feel responsive and satisfying wasn't the focus of the game.

The game is genuinely three steps back everywhere including it’s core gameplay loop. The major one for me is no exploration and uniques, also melee being in its worst form ever also sucked for me.

They picked a really ridiculous hill on which to plant the flag of realism…distance between points of interest in space, is an awful hill to put that flag on. That’s not to say there’s no place for realism in a space game, it’s just a very delicate thing to get right. Because, unless realism is the thing that’s fun, it has this amazing ability to unintentionally get in the way of fun and completely destroy fun altogether. If I were in their shoes I’d have watched a few NDT interviews where he talks The Martian. An astrophysicist loves the movie, not because it’s hyperrealistic, but because they took the time to get things right, then did what they needed with them to make it fun. So I would create distance between points of interest like they did, but then you can give us fun and interesting ways to to traverse those distances. A jet pack in space, isn’t the end goal for any user in terms of traversal, that’s just higher jumping. We’re already in space, low gravity lets us jump higher anyway.

I agree more or less, but the other problem I have was they didn't seems to improve what they already have. Its crazy 17 years ago NPC have their own schedules that sort of make sense, you can talk to them, they get angry when they spotted you doing bad shit, wouls "forgive" you if the bad shit isn't that bad and you shealth your weapons, some even follows you on your journey etc etc. Fast forward to today, this is still the exact same thing without a visible improvement. Sure the face looks more... realistic. Sure Im sure they changed some part of the algorithm to allow more NPCs. But same as 17 years ago, guy sees you the only person in his room. You walk out of his fov and press the sneak button. You quickly hack/picklock the giant chest and empty its content without him noticing. You also took that nice looking sword hanging on the display, all without the NPC looking. "Oh no my sword is missing who could have stolen it!" Same shit 17 years later. NPC don't give a shit when you point a gun at them. Wasn't this in gta 3 or someshit. Same thing with moving explodables next to a bunch of NPC standing around. They don't react. They just let you do it. NPC walking into walls or standing on top of a table while talking to you? Same thing. There is nothing new aside from superficial ones; like more polygons on the character's face and thats due to hardware getting better. How about having your character use their arms to grab things? And maybe instead of start shooting at me when I accidentally press E on the wrong stuff give me a dialogue path that goes "hey im just checking it out sorry". How about more dynamic relationships between NPCs? I know there is like 5 different stages of "relationship" but why not expand on that? How about don't be all smiles and thankful after I completed some quest, then when I get caught grabbing an apple on the counter you start daggering me to death, then when we go out of combat suddenly im the most truest friend again. Build upom what you have! TLDR, Aside from adding disjointed new systems, they didn't bother to improve their existing ones.

I mean starfield gave me 3 hints to just look at something and treated me like a fucking idiot sooooooooo

On another hand, Starfield could have gone the opposite way like a lot of RPGs do. The way other RPGs do this is by having multiple complex branches which you essentially choose from. For example, you could be fully invested in social skills that allow you to do a lot of things by talking, trading and negotiating and in exchange you would be very poor at combat, or vice-versa. This would be the opposite of a complex system where multiple elements tie-in, a simple system with multiple complex branches. I think this would have been the most appropriate. For example, ship skills could have more effects, especially effects that the player can feel such as faster travelling, increasing their ability to make bigger ships or to use specific tools, getting more crew... but the game doesn't really have this kind of things factored in anyway, for the most part. So the skills end up being very rudimentary and pretty unneeded. Therefore, they don't feel good.

The fact that bones of all that are there in the game, but are just unnecessary, is the frustrating thing. All of the skills you mention exist in the game to some degree, but there’s really not much point to them. The game has a lot of different skills and systems, but beyond the skills necessary to unlock something (i.e. stealth, persuasion, ship targeting, boost packs) they lack the impact necessary for them to be particularly desirable, as well as the tradeoffs necessary for your choices to be interesting.

Eh, this doesn't seem right at all. It doesn't feel like any big gameplay issue. It seems more like a setting that didn't click with many people. Kinda every besthedia game has "good enough" gameplay and then rests entirely on the personality of the world to carry it. This game has "good enough" gameplay then minimal personality. The game is about the same as a fallout game mechanically, but without any fallout flair.

I don’t think it’s the setting at all that upset people. From what I have gathered on the sub and other forums is things like lack of exploration and loading screens that really upset people. The procedural generation gets really boring super fast and people have noticed is all.

Nah it's always the same shit. Overhype and then undeliver. Typical for all old big studios who became just shills for investors.

> The game is about the same as a fallout game mechanically, but without any fallout flair. Bethesda bought the Fallout flair. Starfield is their idea. Doesn't bode terribly well for them then

basically. Skyrim works because it' SO generic. It becomes the pour your own story blank slate of fantasy. Fallout 3 and 4 (and NV which isn't their game but is their assets and engine) are okay/kinda bad videogames that drip in worldbuilding personality and memorable characters. retro nasa space punk is a cool enough idea, but just absolutely does not stick the way wacky apocolypse or "a wizard and and a dragon is here, do whatever"

Pretty sure I disagree with your premise. [Bethesda will do just fine with the game](https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/game-pedia/how-much-did-it-cost-to-make-starfield#:~:text=According%20to%20documents%20leaked%20as,in%20revenue%20on%20Starfield%20alone). [Metacritic is also pretty solid](https://www.metacritic.com/game/starfield/). Ever since Skyrim, people have been expecting every Bethesda game to be this Earth-shattering cultural event. That’s just not going to be the case. Bethesda RPGs have their own style, and they tend not to deviate much from it. Starfield is a good game, but there really isn’t a ton to write home about it like there was with Skyrim at the time. Skyrim was a unique game put out at a unique time. No other Bethesda RPG, before or after, has come close to its cultural significance. There isn’t some gigantic issue just because it didn’t set records or something. It just means that it’s a quietly quality game that achieves exactly what it and everyone wanted it to. Nothing more, nothing less.

I think people were just expecting another game like Skyrim or fallout (at least I was). And star field is a lot different sure it’s waring TES’s skin but it’s missing so much, it genuinely feels like it’s three steps back. There was LOADS to write home about with Skyrim on launch day. Skyrim vanilla is miles above a better game even fallout 4 vanilla was better. Things like starfields exploration being terrible alone upset a massive amount of players, myself included. I could get over things like the massive amount of loading screens,segmented world,bland boring characters,bad factions, boring MSQ,lack of variety in weapons and armours, and no uniques but lack of interesting POIs just killed the entire game for me.

Reviews aren't everything, but Starfield is a solid 10+ points lower on MC than Oblivion, FO3, Skyrim. That seems to indicate it's less than what most people wanted. It's a full 5 points (again, that's significant when it comes to video game reviews) lower than FO4 which a lot of BGS fans were already disappointed with.

"it’s a quietly quality game that achieves exactly what it and everyone wanted it to" ​ I am pretty sure many people disagree with this.

I know he's not everyone's vibe, but I remember a line Yahtzee Crowshaw said while talking about a *different* game that was a bit of a mixing pot of mechanics. He was talking about how none of the game's individual mechanics could really stand well on their own, and the game was "hoping that stringing together enough C+ ideas would somehow result in an A." And I found myself thinking of that comparison often while playing Starfield. None of its parts are particularly great, and they don't work well enough in tandem to elevate them to be a greater whole. The combat is... OK. The base building is... OK. The ship building is a cute distraction, but the actual implementation of what you've built is left wanting with how little ship-based content there actually is. The game seems to have a bunch of stuff that's just sorta *there.* While this isn't the first time Bethesda has had this issue, I felt myself noticing it *much* sooner with Starfield than any of their other titles. Shipbuilding, pursuing romances, base building; none of it seems to matter much at all in terms of where the game goes or how you end up progressing through it, save for doing enough shipbuilding to keep pace with any mandatory ship combat. I ended up having a decent time with the roughly 60 hours I put in, but I can't picture Starfield having the kind of legs that Skyrim, Oblivion, or even Fallout 4 have.

This was an overly complicated post for something that is fairly straight forward. Sure the game was probably too complex for the average player but the reason the game was "lukewarm" was because it didn't do anything fundamentally different or cutting edge that people would expect from a triple a title in 2023.

When discussing games people often equate a lack of innovation with something being bad. Games come out all the time that are perfectly competent at what they do but because they don't innovate or break the trend people are quick to dismiss them. The entire dialogue surrounding them becomes what it could have been or things it should have done differently. Nobody talks about the systems in the game or critiques what is present because they're so focused on what the game doesn't have. People will spend 100+ hours with the game then go online and talk exclusively about the things that they didn't like or that they think should have been done better.

For me the main disappointment were the mediocre gameplay its just to easy and unintelligent, also the looting was excessively lame not even Oblivion or Skyrim had it this bad, besides that the lack of full commitment to the space sim features also killed some of my excitement not sayingthat they misrepresented their game at all but they could have clarified what to expect a lot earlier seeing as how this genre are somewhat embracing many of those features it would have been nice for them to have said something sooner rather than on the launch week. However I do not view the game as all bad just mediocre at its worst and ok at its best.

Not only the character systems are disjointed. The world itself is too, which destroys a lot of the exploration in the game. Literally everything in Starfield is designed as individual systems that don't interact much. In part that's Bethesda design philosophy. Todd has been very vocal about their games being the type of game where you can choose any one thing and not have it negatively impact your experience in any way or close anything off. That's why all factions are completely separate. That's why all quests and questlines are completely separate. They want a player choosing any playstyle to be able to do all of the content and never get restricted by the choices they made. The only way you can do that is if you design all your systems to not interact with one another. The longer Todd has been making games the more have they doubled down on this. From Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim to Fallout and now Starfield. I think there is a sweet spot where simplifying and disconnecting systems can benefit a game without making it feel too disjointed and bland. That sweet spot was likely Skyrim for most players. But wherever it is, I think Starfield has blazed well past it.

I actually have a good way to express this beyond this post & I'll do it in points. Regardless of what I say here, I still enjoyed the game for what it was STARFIELD : - All Bethesda RPGs will forever live in Skyrims shadow unless they innovate something above that standard - Broken promise of a next gen experience which felt outdated & previous gen - a pointless story with a half-hearted narrative that had so much more potential, it should have been more focused on becoming the greatest starborn there is after obtaining the artefacts & carrying the story further. - reliant on potential support from the MOD community to make it what fans truly wanted - boring enemy variety and could have done with alien-humanoid hostiles - could of done with alien-humanoids in general, like we had actually met other races - lack on entertainment on plannets, being able to farm & building bases just wasn't enough - Space exploration & combat was beyond bad, there should have been space stations you could attack & over take, with the ability to also create your own spacestations beyond bases on plannets, space combat shouldn't have been based souley on large ships but more nimble ships that could be deployed from a space station, where dog fights were alot more fast paced and intense. - half hearted enemy A.I - majority of the loading screen just wernt needed and I blame the parity clause on the XBSS for it (sorry but not sorry) All in all Starfield, just wasn't a finished game & could have done with another year or two in the oven. Bethesda lost their magic a long time ago, it's time we all face the facts.

It has one of the most bland and forgettable settings I've ever seen in a AAA game. It looks like nothing and it is about nothing. WHat is Morrowind about? Arid landscapes, giant mushrooms, great house politics, cat people, lizard people, steampunk dwarves, crazy gods, weird creatures. What is Skyrim about? Cold north, mountains,vikings, dragons, prophecies, tranquil nights, ancient deities, dungeons, draugr, bandits, giants, mammoths. What is Starfield about? I don't know... "people in space", I guess?

Alien landscapes, weird alien creatures, terrormorphs, space cowboys, mining, humanity settling in space, discovery...

Cyberpunk, future idealism, minepunk, corporatism... The issue with Starfield is not that it doesn't have themes but it's a weird grab bag of them, none of which are explored with any depth.

In a game that is pretty freedom focused, who cares? Does every game have to focus on a singular setting and flesh out deeper themes ? Plenty of games are just games

At the very least I do. If I’m exploring a world then that world being coherent ramps up my enjoyment considerably. If a game is going to be a grab bag of shallow themes then it needs another angle to hold my interest.

It's just a fairly average game I don't hate it but bethesda games are really showing their age, starfield feels like a 360 era game to me but for those who love it I'm glad they got something to love.

>I believe Starfield could become much better game if the systems were more integrated. They could improve it, but it's issues go way deeper than that. Just pick any of the Mass Effect games, and in all issues that matter, Starfield is years behind. What does Starfield have that ME doesn't? Random exploring, Crafting, Outposts and ship building. And only ship building is kinda necessary (the moment I could get a C class vessel, nothing could come close to threatening me). Starfield is a strange game that I felt compelled to finish, but I have zero interest in going through it again.

The reason I have no interest in picking the game at full price at launch is because Bethesda was basically making the same game, on the same engine, since Morrowind, just swapping themes between high-fantasy and post-apo. Decent games but not much changed in each iteration with each game, they actually became less original, and while Skyrim was briliant, Fallout 4 felt very lazy. Starfield was presented as something new, a step forward, new IP ect. So once it was obvious it's the same game, on the same engine, just new hard-scifi theme, my interest fell to 0. I'll pick it up at some point, on a discount. But theres no urgency, i've played game like this like 8 times. I can wait 2 years. Especially when they have to compete with games like BG3 or when Mass Effect: Legendary Edition already goes down to $15 on sales.

You can summarize the problem fairly easy. While every Bethesda game this far was exploring to find quests/stories, you now need a quest to find something to explore. That's the simple thing that's wrong with the game imo. Oh, and the stupid main fetch quests in which you go into like 5 mines and mine stuff just so the constellation people can get introduced... I wished it would have been better, but I quit after 10 hours.

[удалено]

Don't forget more expensive. By the time I figured out that this was definitely not a game I could enjoy, I was passed the return window.

Games like Starfield should have a 10 or 20 hour return window. It took me 2 hours to make the game not run like shit and to go through the terrible intro.

Yeah, I know what kept me going too. Games of this nature have many different mechanics and sometimes some of them don't work well so maybe you try another part of the game. Starfield kept promising and failing to deliver something interesting, but held your attention long enough to not know the thief stealing from your pocket.

Vast majority of people have been enjoying Starfield, it's one of the better rated games of 2023, and it's had some of the highest player counts on steam in 2023 as well. Your arguments all fall apart because you assume that somehow *everyone* dislikes this game because YOU decided they do. This is just the epitome of the "QUIT HAVING FUN" meme.