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I mean, I wouldn’t put Starfield in the same family as Diablo IV, with most of the game behind a microtransaction wall. Bethesda promised Skyrim in Space. We got Skyrim in Space. Skyrim is a polarizing game (much like Witcher 3 is, often for opposite people/reasons).
I don’t think Starfield is “not so bad”, I’m having the best gaming experience I’ve had in a year or two. I think all the critiques are valid, but I don’t really care about most of them.
So why should I play a game I don’t enjoy to punish the makers of the game I do enjoy? I have a very limited amount of gaming time. It gets the game I’m having the most fun with.
I feel like I’m in some sort of fugue state with everyone comparing this to Skyrim. In what way is this like Skyrim? Skyrim, for all its flaws, at least had hand crafted worlds with interesting things to see and do in them. From what I’ve seen of Starfield, that has been completely replaced by procedurally generated barren worlds. Like yeah, you can ‘explore’ them, but for what? What is there even to find?
Skyrim, for all its flaws, at least had hand crafted worlds with interesting things to see and do in them
Virtually 100% of main and faction story arcs are hand-generated content. I would go further and say Starfield used more distinct model-sets than Skyrim did.
For context, Skyrim’s map was ALSO procedurally generated, but most (or all) of the content was built on top of it by hand. We have comparable amount of manually generated content in Starfield, and then tons of procedural content allowing for a larger overall world.
Starfield is approximately 100,000x larger than Skyrim. So yeah, a lot of it is going to be procedurally generated. But you follow a general path, and everything along that path is NOT.
So… no fugue there. Both have similar amounts of handmade content, but Skyrim has a lot of filler content, and that filler content is largely barrel worlds, something that works because planets tend to be barren.
What part of Diablo 4 is behind a microtransaction wall? Some skins?
The problem with both games is they disrespect the player’s time by turning everything into a slog.
That’s way more of an issue with modern game design trying to maximize hours played while minimizing actual content than paid skins. Those may suck, but to be fair it was Bethesda who introduced the damn thing in the first place. I’d rather pretend the premium skins don’t exist but have a fun game than have no microtransactions and a boring 150+ hours of empty world with a total of 35 hours of interesting beats.
What part of Diablo 4 is behind a microtransaction wall? Some skins?
I think it’s “Most of the skins”.
The problem with both games is they disrespect the player’s time by turning everything into a slog.
I can’t speak for Diablo 4 on this, but that’s not Starfield. Just like other Bethesda games, Starfield clearly gives feedback when you’re leaving major storylines and running procedural content. Radiant Quests have mixed reception, but the number of radiant quests you actually need to complete any Bethesda game is in the single-digits.
If you stick to main-story and faction-mainline quests, you touch virtually nothing that wasn’t hand-crafted for your pleasure. No slog. No grind. No nothing. And I find it pretty easy to differentiate between the handcrafted side-quests and the procedural side-quests. If you don’t, just ignore the more obscure-seeming side quests anyway.
a boring 150+ hours of empty world with a total of 35 hours of interesting beats
Is this a personal self-discipline problem of yours? A game with 35 hours of great content is worth the price of a game like Starfield, and you can just NOT go out and play the “150+ hours of empty world” if you don’t like it. While I haven’t beaten Starfield yet (I like procedural content and spend a lot of time in it), that mainline content isn’t gated behind doing procedural stuff. That stuff was added on top of the content you directly pay for.
For me, I love going system to system finding ships to pirate. I haven’t really gotten into planetary exploration yet. Maybe I won’t enjoy that as much, or maybe I will. If I don’t enjoy it, I just won’t do it and it won’t detract from the game.
Really? 35 hours of great content?
Exactly what parts of Starfield struck you as great?
I’ll agree that around the 30 hours mark of my playthrough I was thinking the game felt big and expensive and was excited to spend more time in that universe.
But it wasn’t long after that even the faction quests ended up just so repetitive in scope and even level design that I was over it.
The number of loading screens just to go from point A to B for a fetch quest is probably the worst of any open world game…ever.
It’s like they finally had SSD tech so they just decided to throw any concern over loading out the window in game design.
The story is mediocre, the voice acting is meh, the gameplay loops are extremely repetitive.
The thing you like is the one thing I also enjoyed of ship combat with boarding enemy ships. That was done well, outside of the fact you can’t physically go outside your ship.
And “you can play 35 hours without hating it” as the barometer of whether a game is satisfactory sells yourself and your time short. You as a consumer deserve more, and making excuses for outdated and poor game design doesn’t do yourself any favors. Legitimate complaints about games getting their fair amount of attention leads to better games, as happened with games like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk. The only way Bethesda’s game devs are going to get the appropriate resources from management to focus on making a game that doesn’t waste your time with repetition on the next one is if there’re enough complaints about the repetition in this one that management is concerned about repeating bad press which might impact sales.
You do yourself and the devs disservice minimizing or dismissing complaints and only do the execs a favor.
That’s great if you don’t feel that way. I’m guessing that as you put more hours in the title you’ll feel different, but hope that’s not the case and your enthusiasm remains. But for many players that were quite excited for the game, it ended up being rather disappointing.
Really? 35 hours of great content?
Exactly what parts of Starfield struck you as great?
The major city locations. The major factions/plots. But specifically, I was referring to the approximate amount of hand-made content from previous research. If you don’t think handmade Bethesda content is great, well obviously don’t buy it like I wouldn’t buy another Witcher title.
The number of loading screens just to go from point A to B for a fetch quest is probably the worst of any open world game…ever.
Not my experience. It’s worse than any seamless game, but I found the loading screens and loading times to be pretty reasonable compared to other games. Specifically, I noted that loading times were shorter. And as much as people bitched about the “sequence” loading screens, they’re a whole lot nicer than the black-screen-with-image I was used to in the past.
The story is mediocre, the voice acting is meh, the gameplay loops are extremely repetitive.
Now you’re going full-subjective. As my college English professor used to remind us, “I didn’t like it” is not a real metric for quality. I don’t agree the story is mediocre. I don’t agree the voice acting is meh. And I don’t agree the “gameplay loops” are repetitive. Unless you choose to stick with the intentionally repetitive content.
And “you can play 35 hours without hating it” as the barometer of whether a game is satisfactory sells yourself and your time short
Actually, my metric was “35 hours of GREAT non-procedural content”. YOUR metric is 35 hours without hating it. It may help to remind you that I also enjoy the procedural content. But a lot of people are whining that the whole game is procedural, despite having comparable hand-made content to any other Bethesda game.
If you don’t like Bethesda games, you shouldn’t be complaining about Starfield, the same way I don’t complain about some fancy wine sucking (I don’t enjoy wine). If you DO like Bethesda games, your critiques above probably apply to them more than Starfield. Same issue. This is a good “wine” for people who like “wine”.
You do yourself and the devs disservice minimizing or dismissing complaints and only do the execs a favor.
I’m doing myself and devs a disservice by loving a game because it’s the game I was looking for and the game I was promised? Do you even hear yourself? When I have a hankering for Whiskey, if someone puts a glass of Macallan 25 in front of me, I’m not going to bitch. I’m going to enjoy it. No matter who I’m doing a disservice because it’s not a Budweiser
I dunno why you’re getting downvoted, cause you’re completely right. The microtransaction hell in Diablo is all for shit like horse armor. The game plays exactly the same whether or not you’ve spent an extra dime. With that being said, it is 100% bullshit to have any extra transactions, micro or not, in a $90 game.
He’s getting downvoted because despite everything you said, the valid complaints about Diablo 4 are not similar to complaints about Starfield.
It’s not the “Diablo 4 microtransactions for skins is OK” (which I disagree with) that got him downvoted, it’s “both games disrespect the player’s time”.
Why can’t we have both and the people who want to play each type of game enjoy what they like.
I personally haven’t found SF or D4 to be a slog. D4 remained fun for me though the story and clearing the map which took me up to lv60 and then I put it down to pick up again later, SF is a long game but I haven’t felt like I’ve had to grind or repeat content to keep up, everything I’ve done is a bespoke quest and that’s given me enough experience and cash to level up what I want and buy a top level ship, etc
If you don’t like long games you may well find those games a slog but then you have games like the new Assassin Creed focused at people who want shorter games.
Why can’t we have both and the people who want to play each type of game enjoy what they like.
We can. But they’re different. I have a problem with microtransaction-driven games, even if it’s skins. I won’t fault you if you like D4, but D4 is the first (second if you count the mobile shit) Diablo game that I haven’t put 100 hours into, or even played. The complaint about microtransactions is valid and objective however, and there have been criticisms on cosmetic-microtransactions for almost a decade now. It’s not a feature by any stretch of the imagination, and nobody who plays the game seriously prefers “$25 armor set” to “customizable armor set”
Nobody “has to enjoy” Starfield. But the topic of the hour is whether Starfield was overhyped or (imo) whether Starfield is a valid target for the kind of criticism that came up when BG3 came out and other game studies complained it was too well-polished.
There are objective complaints and subjective ones. I don’t care about the subjective ones. You don’t want base-builders, so be it. You don’t want procedural quests, whatever. Sometimes I play games with a playtime of 30 minutes because I don’t want a long game. But Starfield was not misleadingly advertised or a bug-riddled mess. We got Skyrim in Space, and that’s what we were promised.
That’s a breath of fresh air. I’d appreciate that even if I didn’t want to play Skyrim in Space. If someone comes out with a game and says “It’s just like Witcher 3”, I’ll thank them and never touch it. I won’t fault the game for being like another popular game I happen to hate.
I only brought up D4 here because people are saying Starfield is “just like D4”
Ok, I make you right on the MTX in Diablo and I’ll never engage with the season passes or paid skins myself.
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the case that it was overhyped and made people buy it before anyone knew they were being taken for a ride
I’m still waiting. I’m not the only one. We keep asking for a list of things that were hyped about Starfield that we’re missing, and so far that list is exactly zero items long. Most of the things people are bitching about, I would have told them 2+ years ago Starfield wasn’t going to have, and nobody ever promised.
Further, how are we “taken for a ride”? I’ve spent $20 on Starfield so far (Xbox game pass) and have had nothing but a fucking blast. Are they secretly screwing me by making me enjoy it?
I’m going to reiterate what I said elsewhere. To my understanding, Bethesda promised me Skyrim in Space. When Starfield came out, Bethesda delivered Skyrim in Space. What exactly is fraudulent or misleading about any of that? I’m sorry if you expected Minecraft in Space or No Man’s Sky 2. But nobody ever said this would be that.
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Oh maybe those who didn’t like it far whatever reason accept that things are subjective and their experience is not universal. Plenty of people have enjoyed this game and found things to like even if it’s not perfect. You don’t like it, that’s also a valid point of view, but you can’t dictate to other people that they also shouldn’t enjoy it.
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Because a lot of gamers don’t feel fooled. They expected a Bethesda game and got a Bethesda game for all the good and ill that entails.
You’re entitled to dislike the game, but complaining that it’s not something else is silly. It’s like the people who complain about a lack of easy mode in Dark Souls. Sometimes a game isn’t for you and it’s ok to move on and play something else, but trying to convince other people they’re wrong for enjoying it is a fools errand.
They expected a Bethesda game and got a Bethesda game for all the good and I’ll that entails.
That’s also all we were promised. No false advertising here. Bethesda knows what Bethesda fans want, and they make the game Bethesda fans want. It’s literally the only gaming experience left where I don’t feel like I have to over-research and pirate-demo to figure out if I should buy a game.
Yeah, I was willing to concede with Cyberpunk that although it was a good game on PC/Next Gen from day one, it had a lot of issues on the formats most people own, and CDPR had overpromised the level of detail and systems in the city.
However I can’t recall anywhere where Todd, Bethesda or MS promised stuff more than “Bethesda RPG, but in space”.
Yeah. But I love that about CP. I got it dirt cheap when everyone was bitching, and just waited for them to fix it before I started playing. Best $17 I ever spent for a new AAA game! I can be patient.
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thousands of planets to explore would imply exploration is going to be exciting I’d personally assume
They also said that most of them would be desolate and procedurely generated. They never promised a thousend hand crafted planets.
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You can throw as many buzzwords at it as you like, but that doesn’t diminish the lived experience of people who had fun with the game. Why are you so insistent on convincing people they didn’t enjoy it? There must be a buzzword for that mindset too.
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What about the people who played it on Game Pass and still enjoyed it.
I get it for “free” because I sub to xbox service. I’d have paid $70 for it, though. As for time, I could have spent it in other games, but it’s the first really fun gaming experience I’ve had in quite a while.
It’s easy to make accusations against Bethesda fans like this, but they’re unfalsifiable. You could make the same accusations of people enjoying any other game and there’s nothing they could do to prove they actually enjoy the game. Except that they DO actually enjoy the game.
I’ve played about 20 games this year. If I had to pick only 1 to play (which isn’t far from the truth anymore with my second job), it would be Starfield. And you might be surprised at the names of games that rank below it on the list. Like Elden Ring (which I will never touch again after my cheat-easy-mode run), Hitman WoA, etc. Maybe I won’t be playing it in a year, or two years. Maybe I will.
I think it’s interesting you brought up Souls Games. Quite literally your first paragraph, I feel about them. I have 100% buyer’s remorse about Bloodborne, and lesser buyer’s remorse about Elden Ring. Neither will I ever touch again. To some extent, I kept trying to convince myself the story is worth their unwillingness to give gamers the controls that would actually make the game fun… and I gave up trying to have fun playing it.
I always find it funny that Hello Games over promised and the backlash was such that GOG extended its refund policy, but Bethesda does the same thing every time they release a game and gamers just call it a Bethesda game and that’s the end of it or “modders will fix it”…
What did Starfield overpromise that we didn’t get? As far as I can tell, we got exactly what we expected - Skyrim in Space.
Take my money, Bethesda, and give me more Skyrim in Space please.
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Bethesda promised Skyrim in space and that’s what we got, a game exactly like the one they released 12 years ago but in space. They should have just called it Skyrim: Space Edition.
i don’t entirely agree with that statement about it being identical to a 12-year-old Skyrim. But if it were true, what’s the problem? This whole “bleeding edge stupidity” thing was the first reason we all started to hate AAA games 20 years ago.
Maybe you’re too young, but “can it handle Farcry” was an insult to AAA. Now if it doesn’t use every graphics acronym under the sun at once, and have multi-phased smell reflection when you walk into the bathrooms, then it’s shit.
Also, for the record, a 2014 Engine (UE4) remained the top engine for basically anyone to make games in until last April. Improvements in graphics have slowed down because we’re getting closer and closer to the limit.
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Plenty of people have enjoyed this game and found things to like even if it’s not perfect.
“People enjoy the slop so the slop must not be that bad.”
but you can’t dictate to other people that they also shouldn’t enjoy it.
Yes but we can absolutely point out they’re enjoying slop and are probably the biggest contribution to mainstream games becoming more and more soulless slop.
“I’m Mr High and Mighty, upon my golden gaming chair. I only sample the finest 10/10 works of art and have no time for lowly 7/10 slop that the peasents enjoy. If only they’d accept that I know better what they should be allowed to enjoy”
That’s you that is.
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I only sample the finest 10/10 works of art
No? I’ll admit that something like Enderal: Forgetten Stories, while very fun and better than Skyrim in a lot of ways, is still like an 8/10 even though I like it a lot. If we’re going on the game alone and not how great and generous the developers are to the community, Deep Rock Galactic is a 9/10.
have no time for lowly 7/10 slop that the peasents enjoy.
7/10 for Starfield is incredibly generous. It’s a 5/10 if we’re all being honest and not circlejerking about Bethesda.
If only they’d accept that I know better what they should be allowed to enjoy
You can like and play whatever you want.
But if you share the opinion that overall quality of games, especially triple A titles, has gone down in the past 10-15 years, and you can sit here and give Starfield: Yet Another Wide as an Ocean but Deep as a Puddle + Boring Experience from Bethesda ™️ is a 7/10; I don’t think you really have the right to complain about the declining quality of video games when you’re essentially contributing to it by claiming incredibly mediocre games are above average.
If you feel good that you paid $70-100 for what’s really feels like a $40 barely out of early-access game, hey, I can’t change your mind.
My opinion is fact and everyone else is wrong. I also watch a million essays over the decline of gaming on YouTube so I am very informed.
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what I find more wild is as usual the toxic gaming community can’t handle opinions. I like the game, I don’t care if others don’t, but acting like I don’t have “standards” cause you don’t like it is rediculous. Likewise, I got bored so fast of baulders gate 3 but apparently it’s the second coming of christ and I must be wrong. No, I get why people love it, it just wasn’t my jam. Starfield is
its so depressing that people still seethe this much over others liking a game they didnt
Yeah, it’s pretty underhwelming. There’s a lot of people who claim Starfield is a “great Bethesda game” but “people hyped it up too much.” In my opinion, it’s a terrible Bethesda game. The best thing those games do right is you can set off in a direction and along the way, find a world full of little things. Landmarks, unique little stories, side quests, and even just interesting items to grab. Starfield dropped all of this in favor of incredibly generic proc gen planets that have the same couple of outposts you’ll see on every planet. Like THE SAME. The interiors are THE SAME. Every safe, dead body, message log is THE SAME.
It lacks the one thing that brought me back to Bethesda games despite all their flaws.
God, I couldn’t put my finger on why I didn’t like it. I was just so bored, even with the exploration which I normally love. All of the fun parts of FO4 and Skyrim are missing. Just walking around and enjoying the world is completely missing, replaced by a pretty shitty space travel mechanic.
Fast travel to space, then fast travel to another planet. Fast travel to the surface and bunny hop to an objective through a boring city/space station/whatever. Fast travel back to your ship and do it all over again. I never made it far in the story because I couldn’t be bothered to give a damn. The characters were completely uninteresting at best. oh average they were mildly annoying.
Let me take off from the planets surface and fly in to space a few times before you lock me in to fast traveling. Let me fly from space and scream in to the atmosphere, shooting over the surface looking for a safe place to land, and navigate my way in to the city. Maybe 90% of the surface is uninteresting, that’s fine. But let me at least have some fun learning that.
They made every safe choice, and lost the sense of adventure. Because adventures aren’t supposed to be safe.
I thought I was going crazy. “haven’t I been here before ??” I couldn’t believe they actually copied and pasted entire areas several times over
I mean technically they are copied infinitely due to proc gen. I just don’t get why they didn’t proc gen the POIs as well, would have at least made them more varied.
Yes, I had assumed they would be. It’s not even complicated to make modular interiors and scramble them
Can we really be honest with ourselves for a second. It’s not the greatest game ever and it’s not the worst game ever. It can just be a game that some people like and others don’t.
I personally like it, but I can %100 see why others might not. It doesn’t need to be deeper than that really.
I’m like 90% certain they planned on a method to travel between systems without jumping or fast traveling.
He3 was supposed to be collected for jumping. However, if you run out near a planet that doesn’t have any, it would be very difficult to get anywhere. It would also mean one of the very first things any user would have to do is set up an outpost for he3 or buy a lot of it from vendors.
If there was a way to travel between planets and systems, even if it took a few minutes, new users could at least play around wherever they are and eventually set up an outpost to speed up the process. Maybe it would only be reasonable for planet-to-planet within the same system, but you would be able to find he3 somehow.
Also, the whole thing with jumping to a new system. If your travel path includes another system that you haven’t visited yet, you have to stop there first. It doesn’t make much sense from a gameplay perspective unless they planned on having users actually travel it.
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I have never, and probably will never, play a Bethesda game. They’re not my jam.
Starfield has been rubbed in my eyes for months and months now. And it is apparently merely “okay.”
The biggest studios make the most mediocre crap, and I wish people would stop talking about them.
This is how I thought everyone felt about Cyberpunk 2077, but even on launch it was a pretty sweet Bethesda-game by CDPR.
The entire time I was playing Starfield I was thinking “man, Cyberpunk 2077 was a really good open world RPG after all.”
Nothing quite like juxtaposition to make something shine.
Cyberpunk is a great open world RPG once you get past the 2-3 hours of mandatory railroaded story missions. Seriously I don’t know how they fucked that part up so badly. It’s like they saw the platinum chip storyline from New Vegas and said “You know that’s cool, but what if instead of letting the player choose we make them watch a feature length movie about this plot?”
They really need a “start me after Konpeki Plaza” mode with a few thousand €$ and a handful of perk points thrown in.
The story is genuinely good but really drags on after you’ve seen it once or twice. I have the “skip dialogue” button setup to a macro that spams it like 50 times and a quick button on my mouse to trigger it.
It’s all pretty baffling when you realize there are multiple genuinely good and well thought out builds in the game that are effectively mutually exclusive without a way to reset your perks, so you really need to restart the game to see them, but this is my third run through and I can’t imagine doing this again any time soon.
I’m sure there will be a mod for it eventually. Right now there are save files for each background that have already done Act 1, which is probably what I’ll use for future playthroughs.
CDPR releasing Phantom Liberty after Starfield is a genius move. I immediately bought Phantom Liberty after finishing a Starfield run.
The lack of rpg choices makes it less bethesda to me.
The only hoices that mattered were the ones that affected the silverhand percentages, and which ending you ulimately chose.
There’s also some choices in the relationships V can take, but they don’t change everything much. That said, I think I makes sense that what V does wouldn’t really have much of an effect on Night City.
The choices in relationships basically unlock endings. The game a distinct lack of alternative methods to complete missions via statcheck, which is very bethesda to me.
There are some, but its very few. For instance i went almost full cyberrunner but my cyberrunner abilities didnt give me alternative skips to many missions
The lack of rpg choices makes it less bethesda to me
You mean the games where the dialogue choices are:
- Yes
- Sarcastic yes
- More info/persuasion
- No for now (but yes later)
The checks on certain traits and skills you may have that bypass thing that could gove shottcuts or prevent a fight, e.g Starfield has a LOT of points where persuation would prevent a fight from breaking out, get you more credits, or offer an alternative solution to a conversation.
And its not like I havent played either game, ive already finished both CP2077 and Starfield effectively (minus the recent 2077 expansion)
That seems to be more choices than any other Bethesda RP game. They got ahold of TES and Fallout and completely stripped out the idea of RPG “choices.” Gone are the days in TES and Fallout that one could role play as someone other than “the chosen one.” I’ll never defend Arena or Daggerfall for their graphics, but no game studio has put out a game since those two that literally allows the player to totally ignore the main quest line, with in game consequences for that. Nope. Time doesn’t matter, you’re the chosen one, and will “get around to it.” As far as I can tell, there is basically only one ending to any of these Bethesda “RPGs,” and no matter what choices you make, you’ll find that ending if you slog through enough “quests.”
Admittedly, I’ve never played fallout 1 or 2, though I own them, so I don’t actually know if the world building was as detailed as it was in Arena and Daggerfall.
Bethesda has always relied on modders to fix their platforms for them. They don’t make games. They make platforms that other people can mod to make the games that they wanted to make.
Starfield itself was a step up from FO4, which almost lacked those entirely. Persuation was heavily used, and some of thr character traits you picked at the start led for unique chat dialogues, some just being extra chatter. But others allowing you to bypass an event because you had x trait.
Imo, Starfield isnt goty by any means, but it was virtually a step up from FO4 in almost all fronts except for exploration. Gunplay was better, rpgness was better, factions are better, customization was better. Skill tree imo was better.
I’m only watching someone play through but it’s just poorly written too. Every single person you meet knows you’re the main character and begs for your help.
Not really, many many of them are surprised when you offer to help
Accurate. But props to Bethesda for not including Denuvo so I didn’t have to feel cheated by paying for it.
They dont ivlude denuvo because it wouls effectively make modding harder, in particular, script extenders
People can say all they want about how dated the creation engine is, but its inclusion is the reason why modeing is significantly easier and the executable isnt riddled with drm
I told my friend months ago that as far as I can recall of all the Bethesda games I’ve played, in vanilla they are all at best, good. Skyrim and Fallout 3 are probably the pinnacle of their gaming achievements, but they are good, not great. The ability to mods their games into a Thomas the Tank Engine, Gothic horror, telenovela hellscape abomination is what makes those games great.
Starfield I think will be the same. It’s an ok game, but when the mods start really rolling in is when it will be worth playing.
Imo starfield has a lot of potential strictly because theres soo many planets you can choose to do mods on. Its proceedural vastness will give modders room to do stuff without overlapping with other mods.
Do i think Starfield is the best, far no, its better than FO4 to me, but worse than its 3d predecessors for FO/TES, but it leaves a lot of room for potential due to how much customization already exists in thr game.
agree, the core mechanics of the game I think are fine, the only real criticism I have is some of the visuals don’t look their place in 2023, mods will help here. I’ve always enjoyed the Bethesda RPG playstyle so the game just feels good to me, I’ll admit I expected spaceflight to be more than it is, but I am also ok with it
Will Skyrim remain as Bethesda’s greatest triumph? Find out in the next episode of Elder Ball Z: “Skyrim is the greatest after all”
Morrowind erasure.
Calling it now:
DLC adds the Elder Scrolls planet. You travel there to pick up some lost artifact part and have to fight your way through dragons and vampires and shit. It’s so easy that you decide to build an outpost and retire there.
Elder Scrolls 6 starts off with an alien invader (Starfield you) stealing some ancient power which keeps evil at bay or whatever. You gain allies from the factions if you want and perform a heist from the evil alien thing. Fuck you, buy the game.
A NEW HAND TOUCHES THE BEACON!!
I mean it would be really funny.
Like you’re guarding one of the last untouched Elder Scrolls. An alarm goes off “some is breaking into the vault”. You and your squad are the first to arrive just to see some oddly shaped humanoid flip you the bird as the weirdly foggy drawbridge closes.
Just like i said when it was announced
Bethesda is a shitty game dev studio… lol
Shitty enough to survive 37 years in an industry that sees multiple studios shuttered every year.
Shitty can still be successful.
They literally live off hype then going quiet long enough for people to forget the disappointment. The older people remember and don’t expect much, the middle aged people remember but are hopeful they’ll be better (and that the older people are just jaded), and the younger people just fall for the hype.
This is it, this is all Bethesda is now. Constantly recycling suckers through long dev cycles and hype.
I mean, I can’t say I’ve been there since 86, but I’ve been there since Morrowind and the only time I’ve felt let down was Fallout 4 and 76 which I didn’t even bother with.
Cant wait for fallout 6 in 8 years
And then another 2 for the game to be complete and fixed by mods
They literally released one of the best games of all time with Skyrim, and their previous titles were pretty damn good as well.
I mean, McDonald’s is still around too. Doesn’t mean it’s quality food.
I had McDonalds a couple times when I was in Japan and the difference in quality was shocking. Twice as good for half the price. You can get a big mac meal with a large fry and milkshake for like 950 yen (about 6 bucks)
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You mean $10 for GOTY edition with all the bonus DLC so they can go ahead and rerelease the same thing but with “HD” graphics and another $70 pricetag
Don’t forget, the HD version will:
- Look worse than the game with graphical mods
- Break all existing mods
But fear not! They’ll just remove the original version from the store.
looks at Dark Souls 1 on Steam
240 times. It took me two minutes to finish the “minigame” last time I did it. That’s 8 hours of grinding to max out every skill. Not 8 hours of fun gameplay and visually interesting dragon fights and dungeon crawls, 8 hours (that’s eight hours) of flying from one shiny spot to the next. Eight. 8. Hours. Of slow-ass zero G floating.
Last time I booted the game up, I fast traveled to my ship, took off, and heard Sarah say she has something for me. Something about that same line played for the millionth time absolutely killed my motivation to play, and I haven’t started the game up in like a week. The romance system is too much too fast. I went from “flirting” with Sarah to married in like 4 hours. We’ve known each other for all of one in-game month. Maybe I’m just a broken person, but the way we talk sounds so disingenuously infatuated.
I think about the concept of playing, and it sounds fun in theory, but realistically what am I gonna get done in the next 8 hours? I’ll talk to people that I don’t care about to move through a story that I’m fundamentally disinterested in because I know that >!in order to max out the dragon shou–I mean, Starborn powers, I’ll need to jump through and abandon alternate universes like Rick Sanchez but not as an ironic critique of internet nihilism. Hours and hours and hours wasted on >!timelines I don’t care about just to get to the end game where I… have strong powers and a good ship, and can’t connect with any of the characters because they’ll be the tenth iteration of the same ones that I could never convince myself to care about before.!<
Maybe in a year or two after the game has been updated, I’ll check it out again. Maybe I can shut my brain off for a minute and pretend I’m not >!grinding through universes!< if it doesn’t take me eight hours to max out all the powers. Or maybe I’ll just play BG3 when it comes to Xbox and forget that Starfield ever existed in the first place
I really don’t understand how they green lit that design choice.
It was like Ubisoft towers on crack.
“Let’s take the least interesting gameplay mechanic possible, and then gate one of the only interesting mechanics behind it. And then let’s also make it take a few minutes of jetpacking around a barren planet to get there beforehand, to really jazz it up.”
Todd: “Yes, exactly! See that temple over there? Your can go there. And go there. And go there again. And again. And again. And again. Again. Again. Again.”
Devs look at each other…
“Is Toddbot broken or is this good gameplay design? Kenny, are you writing this shit down?”
I can believe that one of them played the little temple minigame once and thought it was cool, but unless they’re literal space aliens, I cannot imagine the thought of doing that for eight hours even crossed their mind.
Those temples are so weak. Getting the dragon powers felt somewhat primal. But floating through a bit of space dust, not so much
Anon is not wrong.
The thing about word walls is it’s simple and it just works. You suck the ancient text, behold the epic fanfare and leave. Temples, on the other hand, make for a great spectacle the first time you experience it. Then you realize you have to do the same ritual again and again.
this is why I never buy Bethesda at release. Let the modders come, and perhaps Bethy will fix some shit themselves, you never know… give it six months or a year and you’ll always have a better experience, and often cheaper and with more dlcs.
This is why I never buy Bethesda games, if they can’t be bothered to release an enjoyable game I won’t bother rewarding them my money.
It’s not 2002 anymore, there are too many quality games coming out every year to play them all, why do people keep that company alive?
I derived plenty of enjoyment with Fallout 4, Skyrim, FNV (not exactly a bethesda title but one that also shipped with tons of bugs)… at around $40 each, with all their DLC stuff, I think they’re great values. Just not worth the new release jazz.
Read that as more dics. Probably those too.
there’s so many mods for that.
Just don’t bide your time too long, if you’re too late they’ll start re-releasing it for the next 15 years on every platform imagineable and for full price each time. There was a sweet spot with Skyrim on PC where you got upgraded to the ultimate edition (or whatever tf) for free if you bought the game before the transition.
I suppose the money you’re spending on marketing is money you’re not spending on the game
coding is hard, esp. across large teams
marketing is easy. shillbots are cheap and more effective than ever now that GPT is a thing, and then there is “50 cent army” or mechanical turk options if you want a more human option
I like the game. Shipbuilding, base building, and exploring settlements is pretty fun.
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