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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 is there even to find?
Granny Valentine’s singing in orbit Mrs. Kurtz school field trip Space pilgrims
Just a few random orbital encounters that I’ve found. Planet side there are plenty of structures to explore but no real reason to do it; the random loot system ensures you’re as likely to find something exploring on your own as you are fulfilling a bounty contract. There is no special reward or motivation to exploring vs finding these structures via a mission.
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”.
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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”
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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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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.
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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
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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”…
No Mans Sky was nothing like what Hello Games promised.
Starfield is exactly what Bethesda promised.
I don’t see the discrepancy.
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It’s driving me crazy how many people are claiming Bethesda overpromised. I could have written an accurate review (critiques and all) of the game based upon what I saw/heard before its release.
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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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You’re sensing a bit of bias? Because they’re telling you that they like the game?
I’m sensing a bit of bias from you, being completely unable to understand someone else’s point of view once you’ve made your mind up
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Right, but the problem with your logic is in thinking your viewpoint is concrete and everyone else’s is wrong. Fun is subjective, you can’t tell people they didn’t have fun with the game
I didn’t buy the game, and I am enjoying it immensely.
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What about the people who played it on Game Pass and still enjoyed it.
I’m just happy you got to use the new term you learned! Color me impressed!
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 agree with all your points but cannot disagree more on the inclusion of a difficulty slider for Souls games. I have been very adamant about a difficulty slider “cheapening the experience” or “jeopardising the artistic intent”, but it really doesn’t make a difference - at all.
If your enjoyment of the game stems from the fact that the game is difficult and the inclusion of a difficulty slider cheapens your “sense of accomplishment”, then you might have to reevaluate your priorities.
Consider people with disabilities, for example, who are interested in the lore of Souls games and want to experience them themselves but can’t because the games present themselves to be too difficult (for example in the way some bosses in Elden Ring have seemingly endless attack chains that give you no breathing room at all, requiring very precise input on the player’s side), thus gatekeeping the experience from a potentially enthusiastic and interested player.
Or consider people who are just not interested in a hyper tense and difficult time and just want to experience the story and atmosphere of the game. What’s wrong with that? How does that impact your enjoyment of the game if their experience is completely separate from yours?
For reference, I have platinumed numerous FromSoft Souls games and would not feel any less “proud” of that if the games had difficulty settings.
Nailed Souls on the head. I’m an older gamer and my reflexes are dead. I never really liked hard games. I like the story. I bought Bloodborne for the lore, and fully regret it. Hours of fighting the same area with zero progress is NOT why I wanted to play it. I bought Elden Ring after I found out there were cheat mods, tried to play it without them and enjoyed nothing, so added the Easy mod knowing I risked screwing up my Elden Ring account (whatever that means to me), having to play offline the whole time.
I regret buying Elden Ring because I don’t want to have to almost pirate the game I bought just to play it because they want to make it hard.
Thing is you’re trying to compare two different things, one is the (lack of) quality of the product in general compared to what was promised, the other is a design choice.
The irony is, I feel that sentence is more applicable if “lack of quality” is assigned to Soulslike games and “Design Choice” to Bethesda games.
I meant to discuss Souls games’ exclusion of difficulty sliders in a vacuum, separate from the Garfield discussion.
As prefaced in my comment, I agree with your points about Garfield: the developers should definitely be held accountable for their shortcomings and for hyping up a product that falls flat of its promised contend.
But I don’t agree with difficulty sliders being shunned by the “hardcore” community. I feel like this nurtures an elitist environment that doesn’t do its fanbase any good other than gatekeeping and separating fans.
Again, just a separate discussion altogether, not related to the Garfield discussion.
Huh? Starfield is the best RPG Bethesda has made since Morrowind, because it’s an actual RPG. It has the best quest design since Oblivion, with almost none of the quests boiling down to “Go there, kill guys”, but actually needing to talk to people, pay attention to the environment, interact with the world and make choices (and your Background, Traits, Skills and faction membership all add new ways for you to go about a quest.) The weapon design is an incredible improvement over Fallout 4. Almost everything in Starfield is either a massive step up or a return to form compared to their previous work and you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.
And that’s not even to mention things like the ship building system, which is genuinely extremely impressive.
We must be playing different games. Every storyline quest I’ve done has been:
- Go to this random place
- Gun down everyone in sight because my mandatory companion can’t stealth.
- Talk to the named bad guy.
- See if I win a coin flip. 4a. Walk out with a McGuffin. 4b. Gun everyone down again, then walk out with the McGuffin.
It’s nothing but, “Go there, kill guys,” as you call it. Everything is a fetch quest with faceless mooks between me and whatever fifth turn I need to take to get to the end of the corridors in the space dungeon.
And comparing the game to Morrowind is laughable. Morrowind was an amazing feat of world building based on actual player choice. Starfield is a bunch of boxes to tick to see the next space cliche.
Half the damn quests don’t even require me to leave the city they started in. Maybe you just had bad luck picking all of the quests that are like that and none of the others and I had the opposite. Or maybe you did 3 quests and are talking out of your ass. I don’t know, I wasn’t there when you played the game. I mean, did you even do anything other than main story? Join a faction, do sidequests, anything? Because I could point you to half a dozen quests just in early game New Atlantis that are entirely reliant on dialogue, choices etc. without any killing and that do not give you a mandatory companion. Like, do the UC Security quests, investigate the brownouts in the well, talk to the preacher guy, the art guy in Jemison Mercantile, the collector guys in Terrabrew, the bartender at Viewport, the scientist by the tree. The game will literally put half of these quests in the quest log from ambient dialogue, and the other half you get from just engaging with the world and talking to NPCs in the first city you visit. It’s not like these are incredibly hidden quests you have to go out of your way to find. Hell, when you go to Akila the game just plops a hostage negotiation right in your face. I mean, come on, you’re either being wilfully disingenuous or you played that game blind as a bat.
And if you don’t believe me and don’t want to bother playing the game yourself again, just look at the playthrough of somebody like Many A True Nerd. He did a lot of the quests I just mentioned.
I’m curious, you mentioned the hostage scenario at Akila. Does talking down the Shaw gang give you a peaceful method of obtain the artifact near the end of that quest? I try not to save scum so when that whole ordeal went south I had to gun my way through everyone outside of the cavern, then of course only after half her people were dead did Shaw bother striking up a conversation. Not trying to be an ass here, I’m genuinely curious as to whether or not that would’ve actually changed with prior gameplay.
I tried a few side quests and none of them were at all compelling, though I’ll admit I didn’t bother going too deep with most of the factions. I don’t know, each one I tried consisted of walking back and forth and listening to people talk about trees being too loud or some shit I couldn’t care about. Maybe if I’d gone to Space Tokyo or signed up with the space pirates that would’ve been different. But following the main storyline and tooling around the first few planets was repetitive and just more Bethesda-style gun in, then take the shortcut out after getting the thing. I gave up on the game after around 20 hours of not enjoying the experience.
If you’re liking the game then good for you but my experience was that none of the choices I made actually mattered and the world Bethesda built was bland and cliche. And the game mechanics themselves were nothing ground breaking at all, except maybe ship building but that took way too much effort to grok. I tried to like the game but couldn’t.
I don’t know. I didn’t manage to talk them down on my first playthrough, so who knows, but I don’t think so. But I also don’t think every game or even every RPG needs to be designed with a complete pacifist route in mind. The Shaw Gang mission is also about the only one I can think of that actually fits completely with the “formula” you described, outside of maybe the tutorial.
Also, yeah, Space Pirates might actually be a quest for you, or rather being an undercover agent in the space pirates. You just get straight up thrown out of UC SysDef and have them as your enemy if you run and gun those missions, so you have to sneaky, use your persuasion and actually look around your environments if you want to stay with the good guy faction. The part on the cruise ship is especially good for this. Your choices there definitely matter in that regard.
Maybe it’s just a game for people that are really into space in a specific way. Like, sometimes I’ll just look at pictures of the surface of Venus or Mars and think about the fact that there’s billions of these worlds just existing with no observer. Just rocks, dust, storms, rain, volcanoes, all types of things being there and happening, even though no one can see it.
I’m not them, but yes you can talk you way through that encounter not firing a single shot and still get the artifact. Many quests are like that.
To me this reads like you havent done the Ryujin plotline which has a lot of stealth involved, and the UC/Crimson Fleet one that has some detective work/stealth
The Ryujin quest line could be done by running straight through it.
Stealth in the game is an absolute joke.
You’re absolutely right and if I can muster up the energy to start the game back up then Ryujin is probably going to be my first stop.
You’re expected not to kill anyone during the entire Ryujin storyline as it’s “bad for business”. It’s all social and sneaky stealth.
Yeah, that happens when you just skip dialogue
I haven’t skipped any dialogue and I agree with them completely.
Have you actually read the dialogue? Have you even played Morrowind?
Morrowind treats NPCs like theyre hyperlinks in a Wiki. Click on Balmora on any NPC and get the exact same blurb.
There’s like 10 characters that are actually unique and most of em still pull from the wiki when you click on a generic talk option.
my mandatory companion can’t stealth
So tell your mandatory companion to “wait here” when you plan to Stealth Archer. Or give her a chameleon suit. Ironically, the “stealth archer” meme is the most valid critique of Bethesda games, and you’re complaining because it isn’t working well for you.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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
Can we organize and create an AAA game on Lemmy that is worth playing?
I would start with one A first
I’ll make the logo
I actually am more hyped/enthusiastic about simple indie-games nowadays. Even if they often fail at simple manpower or financial issues. The rare exceptions where AAA still delivers is countable with one hand. I even have to think hard to name 5 from the last 10yrs that kinda lived up to the hype.
A joint-effort AAA by us gamers? Nah. Who pays the AAA in AAA? 😁 Times are over where a game like pacman could be done by the intern on a free evening. Including GFX and SFX…
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’ve played TES games since Daggerfall came out. That was my first giant open world game, and despite all of the horrible game breaking bugs I played it so much I risked my college degree.
Based on all of the descriptions and the fact that I’m right now only playing games that run well on the steam deck, I’m skipping this one for now. I couldn’t imagine the thousands of hours I’ve spent playing and replaying TES and Fallout games. But every release gets more dumbed down, it seems.
Honestly, the only thing keeping me from even checking it out is that it sounds boring. I’m still totally overplaying BG3, I love playing Stray, and Depth is great when I have limited time or attention. If everyone was raving about it, I might check it out, but as it is, I can wait.
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Largely the same story from me. One of the things I always pointed to for TES is just the movement. Morrowind, everything is open you can levitate, acrobatics significantly alters how you get around, mark+recall, teleport spells to the shrines, several in-universe fast travel systems, and don’t get me started on the scrolls of icarian flight. Oblivion comes around and you see more instanced cities, less verticality in your movement, to my recollection no teleport spells, fast travel is a menu. I don’t even think there was a system like skyrims wagons that kiiiiinda function like the silt striders. Not to say Skyrim is any better. In fact,it’s even worse! You’re pretty much able to move like a normal person. Mountains? Actually kinda a problem, I’ll get over it (literally) but gone are the days of chugging a levitate potion, or fortifying my acrobatics and GETTING OVER IT.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Starfield so far, put about 80 hours in and haven’t finished any of the questlines yet (largely intentionally, partially because I’ll get sucked into another questline and get distracted). I like the outpost building, the ground combat is fun, the space combat is ok, not on the level of Elite or Star Citizen, but still entertaining.
Solid game to me. Maybe it didn’t live up to people’s wildest expectations, but I went in expecting an enjoyable experience and got it. I don’t really get the hate for it.
Make your own opinion, don’t base expectations off of the unwashed masses. Or do, or don’t play it. You do you
I went in with fairly low expectations. I’ve seen Bethesda’s trajectory so mostly knew what to expect. It thoroughly dissapointed me still.
How did you deal with the outpost building? There’s no way to sort items coming into an outpost so eventually the links all get clogged. For me I built a massive stack of containers that it all flows into, but I still have to go through and pull out junk that’s being used less. It sucks to use. I was really looking forward to that part of the game and it’s like they didn’t even consider the user experience with it. That’s not even mentioning decorations not snapping.
From another of my comments:
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 lack of sorting is really my only gripe with outposts. Right now, I have everything funneling into one main outpost and accumulating in a massive wall of containers, haven’t really jumped into automated crafting yet. Building aspects have always appealed to me in games, so I’ve enjoyed just optimizing resource collection and setting up a supply chain.
I’m not installing any mods until I finish my first playthrough, but a sorting mod will be my first download.
I didn’t play much Fallout outside of a scratched copy of FO3, so can’t speak to any issues with the dialogue from that perspective. I don’t have any major issues with it
That’s fair. I’ve been initially disappointed on a lot of their games due to the slide from doing basically anything in Daggerfall (but you might get stuck in a wall if you turn a corner too close) to Skyrim’s as-linear-as-open-world-gets approach. And I had about 4-5 false starts in FO4 despite playing all the other releases to the ending. Maybe it’s something that will click.
I do have to say that I am finding the Deck implementation of Cyberpunk unplayable without an external monitor and keyboard, so that sets an additional bar.
I’m pretty sure you won’t like it, at least not until lots of mods fix things. I haven’t gotten around to Daggerfall yet (but with Daggerfall Unity I want to eventually), but I have played everything since Morrowind. I had the same experience as you with FO4, despite actually enjoying the world and game at large. I still haven’t finished the main quest. Starfield is so dumbed down and streamlined. You have almost no agency in the stories. Every single thing is told directly to you even when you’re “uncovering a mystery” and it’s super boring.
I’m in the same historical boat as you. Arena was one of my first games on my 486. Here’s my take.
Starfield is Skyrim in Space with Daggerfall’s procedural generation. It may not be the perfect game (or for some people, even a good game), but it is the close-to-ideal Elder Scrolls experience in space.
Honestly, the only thing keeping me from even checking it out is that it sounds boring
I tried a Daggerfall playthrough where I went town to town looking for loot and doing nothing else. It got boring because the towns all started to look alike. So I stopped and just played it how it was meant to be played.
There’s no “boring” take if you ignore the procedural filler content and outpost system (which Bored me in my last FO4 playthrough) and focus on the storyline and main areas. The other stuff is all there for those of us who enjoy mission-fun. I LIKE pirating ships again and again, but maybe you don’t. Literally the boring complaints come from the fact that they gave us Daggerfall-level places to explore, with Daggerfall-level repetition.
That’s a great description! Thanks!
This is the first one that’s made me want to check out the game. I actually weirdly enjoyed the randomly generated dungeons that were basically all the same, probably because I had never played such a completely open world game before. At least some of it had to be the novelty compared to games like Ultima or the D&D games out at the time.
I’ve always played a lot of the RP part in my head - like in Morrowind I’d usually play as an escaped Argonian slave who became a thief-assassin after winning his freedom with a hatred for the Dunmer.
I’d this one is leaning back in that direction, I’ll check it out sooner rather than later.
The thing I like most is that the procedural stuff is never forced on you. Go pirating a bunch of random ships with random people. Or stick around to the Mars colony. Go exploring random military and science bases, or only go to the ones that were handcrafted. It’s really not hard to avoid the procedural content that bores you if any does. Nothing has bored me so far.
I learn the games I like from “what’s wrong with it”. Here’s what’s “wrong” with Starfield
- It’s not a physics simulator. Ragdoll is about the best you’re getting. The ship-building is unprecedented for an RPG, but not Space Engineers.
- It’s not an action shooter. People ridiculed that guards won’t aggro on you if you happen to shoot near them. There’s a video of someone drawing a minigun outline around a chill guard
- It’s not a seamless space simulator. You get load screens and the bases you’re building are cooler than FO4 but no minecraft. The FPS portion is much more polished than ship-flying.
- It’s not a NY Times bestselling storybook . There’s a few tropey factions and a few obvious plot points. There’s one specific mission where you’ll want to take the “sneak an atomic bomb into the building and reenact Fallout3’s Megaton bad version” strategy whether you play good or evil, but you won’t have that option (you’ll know the one I’m talking about if you see it). In that one case, I’d appreciate a “something good happens if you find a way to slaughter everyone in that boardroom”, but again… not what the game is about.
…all of the above, of course, sums up to “Skyrim in Space”.
That all sounds reasonable. I mean, Skyrim has the classic feature where you stealth shoot an arrow into somebody and they say “Who’s there?” followed by “I guess it was just the wind.” or whatever - with an arrow sticking out of their chest. At some point it just becomes a classic Bethesda aspect of the game. The base building was my least favorite part - but that was more about having to run back to defend stuff rather than just pushing through on side quests.
You nailed it.
My funniest moment is realizing that grenades are better stealth weapons than a pistol. Someone sees you shoot a silenced pistol, you’re screwed. If someone watches you throw a grenade, but you get into hiding fast enough, they don’t put 2 and 2 together between the thing you threw and that random explosion.
I was in a certain important location and accidentally hit the grenade button… So without thinking I ran. Everyone but one died, and nobody was mad at me. So I looted all the corpses, and walked on whistling.
God that reminds me of almost EVERY bad day I had in Fallout games.
What a grand and intoxicating innocence. How amusing. The Nerevar; an Argonian. The gods must be spiting me.
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 $55million lol.
It’s impossible to not overhype for Bethesda because all the hype they create will get uncontrollably inflated.
Don’t forget the other Miyazaki, they literally posted a single image for an Elden Ring DLC and people have been going crazy about it for half a year.
But capitalism demands that games are overhyped. That hype will inevitably lead to more sales, and to that end it genuinely doesn’t matter if the game itself lives up to it.
Can we really be honest with ourselves for a second. It’s not the greatest game ever and it’s not the worst game ever. It can just be a game that some people like and others don’t.
I personally like it, but I can %100 see why others might not. It doesn’t need to be deeper than that really.
I find the hype of something is inversely proportional to the quality of the end product. If some game company put 7 years into a game and their marketing was, “could be alright, see how you like it”. I’d be all over that shit like white on rice.
This is how I thought everyone felt about Cyberpunk 2077, but even on launch it was a pretty sweet Bethesda-game by CDPR.
The entire time I was playing Starfield I was thinking “man, Cyberpunk 2077 was a really good open world RPG after all.”
Nothing quite like juxtaposition to make something shine.
Cyberpunk is a great open world RPG once you get past the 2-3 hours of mandatory railroaded story missions. Seriously I don’t know how they fucked that part up so badly. It’s like they saw the platinum chip storyline from New Vegas and said “You know that’s cool, but what if instead of letting the player choose we make them watch a feature length movie about this plot?”
They really need a “start me after Konpeki Plaza” mode with a few thousand €$ 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.
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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.
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.
Try BG3, literally everything matters, almost everything is a choice with consequences and i don’t even know what the main plot is anymore since I am overwhelmed with possible choices
Oh I will. My current game that I’m waiting on is Cities Skylines 2, but I’ll probably pick up BG3 around the New Year.
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
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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
I’m actually considering signing up for Xbox game pass, $3 for a month to play starfield. Feels like a fair trade
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Accurate. But props to Bethesda for not including Denuvo so I didn’t have to feel cheated by paying for it.
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Just like i said when it was announced
Bethesda is a shitty game dev studio… lol
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”
