This entire thread is hilarious. I’ve been paying for therapy like a sucker, I didn’t know you could get infinite amounts of free psychoanalysis just by suggesting that Starfield is somewhat underwhelming.
I see. So how does that make you feel?
The amount of gaslighting I’ve seen gamers do to themselves over this game has been wild. “Is it me? Maybe I’m the problem. Maybe I just don’t like games anymore?”
They’d rather do that than admit that a Bethesda game kinda sucks. And if you say it’s not good, people will come after you. The super Bethesda defenders keep claiming the game is getting review bombed, but from what I’ve seen it’s the other way around. If you say something negative about it, people will jump on your case. I’ve seen so many streamers and YouTubers try and cover their asses when trying to speak critically about this game to keep the Todd brigade from forming a mob in their comment sections.
It’s been such a wild game release.
Starfield fans are vicious. I got called mentally ill, incel, shit like that because I call out their loading screen simulator.
‘loading screen simulator’ lol I love this, imma use it
deleted by creator
Hmmm. I think this relates to your relationship with your father…
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.
No Man’s Sky has you covered, in all the ways Starfield doesn’t.
No Man’s Sky was terrible at launch.
Starfield isn’t a great game but no man’s lie is not better. Both are kinda shitty. Norman’s sky was just way worse when it was released.
NMS does exploration and procedural generation way better than Starfield
No mans sky is perfectly okay rn, I have no idea what you’re talking about
It used to be bad. Got updated to be a highly good game!
Originally it was only soulless samey procedurally generated planets. Almost like a beta version of the game. Glad that it got updated.
Good for you if you like it. It’s still a soulless collectaton with meh building options and meh combat. It’s better than it was at release but it’s still a absolute average game.
The building options are also better than SF though. It’s just much more intuitive and less grindy than Starfield is.
I don’t play it myself, my brother does. It seems fun for those who love exploration, and the worlds at least have some variety and the campaign holds more interest than that of starfields’.
Although yeah. At the end of the day we’re a bunch of peasants who are arguing over which type of moldy bread is best, while the lords still get their money for the purchase.
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.
Loading Screens: The Game
It makes me appreciate the tech in StarCitizen, pity it’s just lacking a game.
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
Lost interest in a few hours I was sad.
Great potential, horrible interface, wonky mechanicsSame. The interface looks kinda cool, but the UX is awful, and the story is boring. The biggest reason it doesn’t capture you IMO is you just jump around from place to place instantaneously right from the start and there’s no obvious reason to just go exploring somewhere. In Skyrim you’re literally on foot and the world slowly expands around you and you become interested in it.
In Skyrim you’re literally on foot and the world slowly expands around you and you become interested in it.
Yeah, and exploration wisey I prefer Oblivion even more. Skyrim feels smaller and less varied, and horses and other fast-travel options are cheaper and easier available.
I got to hear a talk from a level designer who worked on Skyrim at Bethesda who had since left the company, and we needled them with some questions about Starfield and it was interesting at the time but even more interesting in the hindsight of now playing the game.
We kind of intuited through some of their answers that it sounded like they felt that with Skyrim, individual level designers and programmers and people had way more freedom to put stuff into the game; many of the more memorable side quests and interactions were never remotely planned to be in there but were just threwn together by a couple people who stayed overnight recording voices and programming in these quests and interactions and stuff, and it sounded like they did not think that was was the case with Starfield and it was a much more rigid and controlled dev environment, which would explain why so much of the stuff feels like it’s randomly generated stuff you’ve already seen instead of coming across these weird handcrafted things.
They also talked a lot about open world level design in general and talked about how good open world level design is often inspired by Disney world, where they pay super close attention to sightlines where ever you are to make sure there’s always (ideally multiple) interesting things to see and explore. You shouldn’t need a waypoint or hud marker ideally, you should just walk out of one thing, look around and go “hey that looks neat let me go see what’s over there”, discover something magical, walk out and repeat. That kind of feeling made sense and resonated with me at the time and made me think of the new Zelda games and some of the better open world games I’ve played, but now in the context of Starfield, it feels like the loading screens between planets pretty fundamentally broke that cycle, and disrupted that feeling of exploration that Skyrim gave you.
I was at a talk by Bruce Nesmith for a game development club I was in in college shortly after FO4 released (and also shortly after they filed the trademark for Starfield but before we knew anything).
One thing I remember well is him saying how they messed up with the FO4 dialogue options. Every one was “yes, no (for now), sarcastic yes, and more information.” I had a reasonable amount of faith at least that would be fixed in Starfield. It isn’t, though it’s like they thought it being presented on a wheel was the part people were upset with, not the complete lack of choice. In Starfield the choices are identical but they’re now presented in the classic box at the bottom of the screen.
The “Disney effect” is exactly what’s missing from Starfield that makes it so boring. Because of the format of the planets and star systems, you can’t just see something to go to. Discovery is done through a menu, which is incredibly boring.
And on top of that, when you do land on a planet, there’s literally nothing to do and see. It feels like there are no more than 10 unique buildings that get swapped in and out… once you’ve seen them, there’s nothing left to discover.
It would have been infinitely better had it been 1 star system with like 4 planets and 20 moons. Each one with multiple locations on the surface. Instead of this thousands of planets but basically all randomly generated none of them really interesting.
They kept saying that’s realistic because most plants are boring but it’s a RPG not a SIM so that logic doesn’t track.
The best space game is still The Outer Wilds and that game has only about 5 planets with the largest one only been about half a mile across. Scale isn’t everything.
Same. After visiting 3 random planets and entering the exact same bases with the exact same enemies… Except they were like random level from 3-48. Not that it weirdly mattered much. Already felt godlike.
AAA gets worse every year, and I’m gamer for over 4 decades… I was so glad I didn’t bought the crapfest
Maybe don’t just go to random bases? Follow a quest and you will encounter incredible environments/dungeons.
Those random bases are for end-game stuff when you have literally nothing else to do but you still want to play your save file.
I did in the beginning. Then got bored by the loading-screens. Besides it only worked at all with a mod that enabled file-caching. Otherwise I had horribly unsynched audio, ending with completely stopping sound. It was a joke. And no, it wasn’t my system, which is decently beefy to play every other AAA-title on FHD@maximum/ultra.
I excepted nothing, and so I wasn’t overly dissapointed (especially coz I didn’t buy it). I’ll do the wise thing and just wait 1-2 years. The bugs are maybe mostly squished out by then and the community will have made it a loooot better.
I really wanted to like it btw, it’s not that I was just glad to jump on the hype- or hate-train. I don’t care for those. I just played enough games to see the many many many flaws. I didn’t even care how dated the graphics were :)
Also btw, the argument is pretty weird considering it’s an OPEN-WORLD game. In Skyrim&Co I also often wandered the world for many many hours before even starting any quests.
As an old-schooler, I think this is all funny. A lot of the Daggerfall fans were disappointed in Morrowind because it moved away from procedurally generated “everything else”. The world felt so tiny.
Starfield adds some procedural outside of its core paths to give us that unlimited replayability, and people just complain about it.
I’m gonna keep playing it, I just have better things to do at the moment. I have about 35 hours sunk into it. It will get better in time with updates and mods.
Same, I actually refunded it after 2 hours because I was already bored.
And I like space games.
It’s not Bethesda’s greatest game but it’s not a terrible game in general. I definitely think companies need to stop over hyping their games as some groundbreaking game of the decade only to release a generic RPG.
I definitely think companies need to stop over hyping their games as some groundbreaking game of the decade only to release a generic RPG.
Not really possible when your average gamer will overhype literally anything even without any marketing available. People are just stupid.
Hayao Miyazaki’s latest work have no promotional marketing, hyped up by the fans, made $55million lol.
It’s impossible to not overhype for Bethesda because all the hype they create will get uncontrollably inflated.
Don’t forget the other Miyazaki, they literally posted a single image for an Elden Ring DLC and people have been going crazy about it for half a year.
Removed by mod
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.
deleted by creator
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.
I was turned off from the moment i saw at least most romance characters look 40-50 years old. Who the f wants those kinds of storylines with someone old enough to be their mom?
Your dad, for one.
Bold of you to assume everyone that plays is less than 30
Removed by mod
I’m in that age range, and I wouldn’t want that type of storyline with a character who looks like a kid to me.
I find the hype of something is inversely proportional to the quality of the end product. If some game company put 7 years into a game and their marketing was, “could be alright, see how you like it”. I’d be all over that shit like white on rice.
That pretty sums modern games up. The graph of marking-hype on X and enjoyment on Y is a buggery slope downwards :-) Sadly so, I might sadly add.
Counterpoint: Devil May Cry 5.
Gotta admit. Dunno the dmc-series at all. So i just take your word for it, random Internet stranger 😊
They hype it up because it works. Half or more of big games budget is marketing, and they make it all back with a good profit.
Exactly. The hype is always bs because in big studio it is literally marketing’s job to embellish/lie to generate hype and sales. Without a marketing dep you will only hear about games through word of mouths which imply the game made it on its own merits.
I wonder how much money was wasted on that Imagine Dragons song, that literally no one cares about now, that should have just been put into development.
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.
They just launched too early, but tried hard to fix everything. I played it some weeks/months after release and had ZERO bugs (not counting some minor texture-issues, who cares). And another run recently. Absolutely gorgeous world, and one of the best story and story-telling and characters of the last many many years.
Though I obviously was lucky, as many had massive problems with the game. But then again, people with much shittier systems than mine could game starfield fine, while I couldn’t at all.
Okay, I just want to clear up that bugs were not the only reason people were upset. They literally were hyping things up prerelease that weren’t even in the game. That’s why they spent so much time being sued in the EU for it.
The writing is also amateurish, and there’s a lot of ‘cyber’ but not a lot of ‘punk’. People were right to be upset, and personally I think they still should be. The only reason their PR got turned around was because of an anime that released based in the world, and now suddenly the game’s being handed ‘labor of love’ awards—they hadn’t even done much to fix up the game at that point!
So yeah. Not just bugs. I’m sure I’m even missing things.
Well, the problem is: I don’t care for pre-release hype/hate. I try on my own with unclouded judgement. So I didn’t know what they were promising or not. Who cares what marketing-departments puke out? They never are on par with the actual thing.
As for the rest. If you consider the writing ‘amateurish’ then a) I must be easily entertained, as I found it great (for a game) b) what GREAT writing in games have you recently had? Without sarcasm, the bar is low with AAA. c) considering it was one of the very very few SciFi-RPGs, it surely was one of the best. There are just so many without dragons and wizards and elves for a change.
Honstely, I don’t know what you want to be fixed, I had two runthroughs with zero problems. Everything worked perfectly fine for what I needed a mod to make it perfectly fine in the first run.
To me, they earn a labour-of-love-whatever-award. It works, it’s great, it’s worth it’s asking-price. Surely better than Starfield, Diablo4 and whatever else recent AAA-fails were brought upon us.
IMHO at least. And no, I’m no fanboy or hater, I don’t care for those things. No bugs and I’m having fun => I’m happy, I buy again. Bugs and I don’t have fun => Fork you in the eye.
deleted by creator
Okay, but this was more than prerelease hype. This was showing footage to players things they can do, with the explicit intention of driving up pre-orders and day one sales (I think pre-ordering is extremely silly, I don’t participate, but that’s neither here nor there). Lying about your product to get people to pay $60 for it is extremely unethical, and some EU governments found it to be enough to take them to court over. So this is beyond your personal ‘judgments’. Sorry.
Limiting this arbitrary contest to just AAA games is pretty silly, seeing as they have the budget to hire amazing writers, and some of them get blown out of the water by indie titles. That’s not the argument you think it is. Gaming is just wider than that, and I would argue the boundaries should be expanded to include all entertainment seeing as all forms of entertainment are making a bid for your limited time/attention, but that’s just me. If you must have ONLY AAA games, then Red Dead games, GTA, and Mass Effect games are some from off the top of my head. Granted I don’t play that many.
Your bar for labor-of-love must be really really low if a game just working is enough for you. That same year, No Man’s Sky was much more deserving of the award as it isn’t being made by a corporation with endless resources, and yet it managed to improve itself at least twice as much.
Tbh, you writing out several paragraphs defending yourself for enjoying Cyberpunk kinda smells like fanboy behavior to me. You try to be reductionist and dismissive a lot in what you wrote, which is pretty lame and anti-intellectual. We’re here to discuss the facts, not what you enjoy spending your money on. More power to you, spend your money however, but I’m not here to discuss that with you.
Nah man. I’m far from fanboy. I hate the industry nowadays. I don’t preorder either. For AAA i download and try first before even thinking of spending a buck. And i didn’t hesitate to spend 100 moneyz on pacman and co when they came out.
And again: i don’t care for promises, videos and whatever else marketing pukes out. It will never come close. Their job is to sell things that will never exist and the devs can’t fulfill. I noticed cyberpunk was to be released some day, it was from cdpr (so it got a positive prejudice) and i had a good experience. Johnny alone was memorable enough of a character. Friends told me how shitty and buggy it was, never noticed. Though i played with many mods as that time, dunno if it had sucked without. Didn’t know, didn’t care. Had fun. After finishing, i bought it. And months later i did the second playthrough. And in some months i’ll gonna get the dlc and play a last time.
Where is a fanboy here? If it had sucked, i would’nt have spent a cent. If i was a fanboy, i would’ve preordered 😁
Maybe YOU sound like being a victim of confirmation-bias after you felt victim of the hype and lost moneyz. Would be only fair after calling me a fanboy 😊
And no, I’m no AAA-sucker. Many one-man-indies rock over multi-million-titles. AAA mostly just suck ass (nowadays).
And yes. Lying about products suck and should be forbidden. But it ain’t and won’t. So we can just ignore the silly marketing alltogether. Pirate their shit, evaluate in peace (as demos died), and make solid purchase-decision AFTERWARDS.
Accurate. But props to Bethesda for not including Denuvo so I didn’t have to feel cheated by paying for it.
deleted by creator
wrong game and wrong company
You’re thinking of the new assassins creed
Just like i said when it was announced
Bethesda is a shitty game dev studio… lol
I never watched any trailer because i assumed that’s what the game will be like. But after watching some gameplay, it’s somehow worse. Some things look really good, it has these trailer moments. But some textures for example are straight up 480p. A part of me thought that they learned from fallout 4 or fallout 76, but that’s not how you print money, right?
The fact alone that the UI is laughably bad, is just one thing, but the loading times, in a game where you spend so much time opening and closing your inventory shouldn’t be accepted, ESPECIALLY since a modder fixed their UI on day one. But SOMEHOW there are people out there defending that bullshit. If i would care for Bethesda games and spending ours collecting space trash, i’d be livid. Their next game i 6 years will still be just a bit better looking than skyrim.The thing that really gets me is that the game can’t run on a normal HDD. Despite being as sectioned off as it is by loading screens, and the graphics being pretty standard for a modern AAA game, it literally requires an SSD to run.
The only other game I’ve encountered that requires an SSD is Baldur’s Gate 3, and even that runs perfectly fine on a normal HDD, so long as you don’t mind occasionally waiting for stuff to load in after a loading screen.
The game they published before this one was Redfall so I went into this release expecting that
I intentially skipped all that hype on Starfield because I don’t trust Bethesda, and it’s starting to look like I was right.
To the surprise of no…I mean apparently a lot of people who should probably know better by now
Can’t wait to try it in 5 years
This is my approach as well. I now always wait, sometimes years, before buying a game because I’ve been burned too many time buying day 1 releases or, even more horrifyingly, pre orders. My track record? Well, I preordered FO76 because I loved FO4 and foolishly expected a similar experience. $60 and 1 hour of game play later, I put it down and never touched it again. Also preordered CP2077… huge mistake. I didn’t have a cutting edge computer but it was no slouch… ran like shit. Only played it a year after release. Also and worst of all, I preordered No Man’s Sky. Like, what the fuck was that about? Loved it 2 years later tho. After CP2077, I vowed to never ever buy a game less than a year old. It’s stupid to support shit bullshit behavior from these so called “AAA” companies. I had that term “AAA” anyways. It’s just marketing speak for, more expensive than what it should ever be.
deleted by creator
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.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
At first, I thought the quality seemed “meh” because it was released so close after the masterpiece that was Baldur’s Gate 3. Everyone had high expectations and that’s a hard game to follow, I believed.
After removing myself from Baldur’s Gate 3, I discovered that I was wrong. Starfield still a “meh” game when taken on its own.
My personal biggest disappointment is the repeating point of interest. Yesterday I was on two planets and both had, even on the same planet itself, three times the same mine shaft, twice the same outpost, twice the same hole in the ground, with even mobs and ore placed on the same spots.
Seriously, this should never happen under any circumstances. It was the first time in the game I kind of felt the negative grow. While I still enjoy the rest.
That said, it’s also true that the game is average in many aspects, which is enough to be enjoyable for me but not others.
I didn have this once, 2 planets with identical mines, even had the same dead bodies in the same spots
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.
Seriously, it was my first open world RPG and I’ve been chasing the dragon ever since
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.
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
The fact BG3 came out just before Starfield made me dislike the game even more than I probably would have I think. I went from playing probably the best RPG ever to Starfield, which doesn’t even try to make you think you’re playing any role except the chosen one. The fact that you join Constellation and almost instantly become not just a full member, but the person who everyone else takes orders from is rediculous.
The story sucks, the gameplay is bland, and there are so many friction points that constantly make you think about the fact you’re playing a game. It’s honestly sad. I love sci-fi so I was reasonably excited for the game, even knowing it’d be a modern Bethesda game, and it still let me down. The sci-fi concepts in the game aren’t even done well.
The release timing is unfortunate.
It really does show that Bethesda are running about 10 years behind everyone else.
It cost them twice as much to make as BG3 did. How? Just compare any BG3 character and how animated they are thanks to full motion capture, to the same Bethesda animatronics they’ve used since forever.
It is not unfortunate, it is a strategic win by Larian. BG3 was actually supposed to come very late, but Larian released it early after learning about Starfield’s release date.
They needn’t have worried. At all.
People are even talking about Cyberpunk 2077 favourably again. That’s how much shit Starfield is getting.
Cyberpunk 2077 was good (on PC) when It came out, and now it’s great. It has earned that favourable talk.
The feeling I got playing BG3 or even skyrim was one of “I can’t wait to try this again with X group/build/decision”. With starfield I don’t know if I’ll ever even get to the point of fucking off on a random adventure, let alone finish the story.
Part of my problem with Starfield is that the builds are basically pointless. Your background only gives you perk points in a few skills, and the only background worth using is Bounty Hunter since those three skills are absolute necessities for playing the game. Your traits matter more, but you can get absolute duds. I thought I had some strong role playing potential with a Freestar Enlightened whose parents are still alive… but those traits suck and don’t work together in the slightest. As an Enlightened Atheist, I have access to a chest with some hot garbage in a location on Jemeson that I had no reason to visit until past level 30. As a Freestar, I have some “unique” dialogue options that boil down to “I’m also from Akila! There are Ashtas!” My parents were really cool to have around… until I found out that giving me an ass garbage ship is the last thing they ever do. They’re also UC, so I have no idea how my character is from Akila. My grandma was a UC marine in the war, and I’m wearing her Freestar-killing duds now. I couldn’t even invite them to my wedding. My wife’s big character quest has to do with her Freestar-killing ship crashing on a planet, and I don’t recall there even being a dialogue option about those being my people she was killing back then.
Why are my parents UC if I’m Freestar? Why can’t I invite them to my wedding? Why aren’t they enlightened? Surely Bethesda could have spent some of the last decade making 16 sets of parents to account for the 4x4 possible combinations of religion and background. Nah, they spent all that time making an absolute assload of crewmates you can and never will hire.
best RPG ever
Disco Elysium would like a word.
I love both. A lot.
Minish Cap master race 😞
There are dozens of us.
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
If you are trying to grind an RPG, you are playing it wrong.
This isn’t Dark Souls. Nor would I want it to be.
